RETScreen is a genuinely good deal. It is Natural Resources Canada's clean energy analysis software, and its Viewer mode is available free of charge. It will size a retrofit, test whether a renewable project pays back, and measure and verify performance after the work is done. But every one of those analyses rests on the same foundation: clean monthly energy and cost data, and a baseline you trust. Assembling that baseline by hand keying utility bills is the part that quietly consumes an analyst's time before the interesting work even starts.
If your RETScreen models keep stalling at the data gathering stage, EZGB collects your consumption and billing data and hands it back clean and standardized. Start a pilot at ezgb.ca, and we will help you build the baseline your analysis needs.
What RETScreen needs before it can tell you anything
RETScreen models a wide range of technologies, from energy efficiency and heating and cooling to renewable power and cogeneration, and it can measure energy performance after a project is implemented. Whatever the analysis, the inputs come down to a small, unglamorous set of facts about how a facility actually used and paid for energy:
- Monthly consumption for each fuel the facility uses: electricity, natural gas, and often water or thermal energy, in consistent units.
- Monthly cost for each fuel, so savings can be expressed in dollars and financial viability can be tested, not just in energy units.
- A clean baseline period: usually a full year or more of consecutive months that represents normal operation before any change.
- Consistent, gap free timing: real billing period dates with no missing months and no double counting, so the baseline is honest.
- Enough history for measurement and verification: comparable data before and after a project, so RETScreen can separate real savings from noise.
Notice what all of these have in common. They are exactly the values printed on the utility bills the facility already receives. The analytical challenge is rarely the math. It is getting a clean, complete, standardized version of the billing history into the model in the first place.
Why hand keying bills is the real bottleneck
The traditional way an analyst builds a RETScreen baseline is to gather two years of bills, open each one, and type the consumption and cost into a spreadsheet, month by month, fuel by fuel. For one small building that is an afternoon. For a campus, a manufacturer with multiple meters, or a portfolio study, it is days of transcription before a single scenario gets modelled.
That manual step is not just slow, it is where quality problems enter. A transposed digit inflates a month. A missing bill leaves a hole that skews the annual baseline. An estimated read gets treated as an actual one. Because RETScreen's outputs, the savings, the payback, the emissions reductions, are only as good as the baseline underneath them, a small data error at the start turns into a wrong recommendation at the end. And when the client asks where a number came from, an analyst who typed it by hand cannot always point back to a source cleanly.
RETScreen has earned real scale on the strength of its analysis, with over 465,000 users worldwide and a cumulative total of well over 8 billion dollars in reported savings as reported by Natural Resources Canada. The tool is not the constraint. Feeding it clean data is.
How EZGB delivers RETScreen ready data
EZGB (Easy Green Button Connector) collects utility consumption and billing data from three sources and normalizes electricity, gas and water into one consistent structure. For a RETScreen analyst, that means the monthly rows you need arrive in the same shape regardless of where a given account's data lived.
Authorized utility connections
Where a direct connection is available, EZGB pulls consumption and billing data from the utility with the customer's authorization, across 50 or more utilities, with up to two years of history where it exists. Two years is close to ideal for RETScreen, because it gives you a full baseline year and, later, a comparable reporting year for measurement and verification without waiting for it to accumulate.
Green Button files and authorizations
Green Button is a standardized customer data export built on the NAESB Energy Services Provider Interface (ESPI) standard. Because the format is standardized, EZGB can ingest a Download My Data file or an ongoing Connect My Data authorization and turn it into the same clean monthly records as any other source, with the billing period dates intact so your baseline lines up correctly.
PDF and scanned bills with BillScan
Many facilities, especially older or smaller accounts, only have PDF or paper bills. BillScan digitizes those documents, reading consumption, period dates and charges off each bill and producing the same standardized records as connections and Green Button. This is what lets you build a complete baseline for a real building, where some accounts are on a modern portal and others still arrive as a scanned PDF in an inbox.
Delivered clean by API, CSV or SFTP
However you build RETScreen models, EZGB can hand the data over in a form that drops into your process:
| Delivery | Fits this workflow | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | Custom tooling and repeatable studies | Standardized monthly consumption and cost pulled on demand into your own baseline builder. |
| CSV | Analysts working in spreadsheets | Consistent columns you paste straight into the RETScreen input structure, mapped once and reused. |
| SFTP | Recurring or multi facility work | Standardized files delivered on a schedule, so refreshing a baseline is a download, not a re transcription. |
The common thread is that the analyst stops being a data entry clerk. The bills become clean rows, the baseline becomes reproducible, and every figure traces back to a source you can show a client. If that is the friction in your RETScreen work, EZGB is built to remove it, and you can size the right feed at ezgb.ca.
A Canadian anchor: Green Button is already mandated in Ontario
RETScreen comes from Natural Resources Canada, and if your work is in Ontario the data supply side is already regulated to help you. Under Ontario Regulation 633/21, electricity and natural gas utilities were required to implement Green Button Download My Data and Connect My Data, and the Green Button Alliance has certified 55 Ontario utility platforms against the NAESB ESPI version 3.3 standard by the November 1, 2023 deadline. That makes standardized, shareable data the default for a large share of Ontario accounts, and EZGB fills the remaining gaps with connections and BillScan so your baseline is never missing a meter.
Clean data in, trustworthy analysis out. Book a walkthrough or start a pilot at ezgb.ca, and we will get standardized consumption and cost data flowing so your next RETScreen study starts with the baseline already built.
Sources
RETScreen work depends on the same clean consumption history that performance contracting does, which is covered in utility data for ESCOs and performance contracts.
- RETScreen, Natural Resources Canada
- RETScreen Clean Energy Management Software announcement, Government of Canada
- Green Button Alliance: 55 Ontario utility platforms Green Button certified
- Green Button Alliance: Ontario energy data regulation requires utilities to implement Green Button
Source: natural-resources.canada.ca