Frequently Asked Questions

The Green Button initiative is an industry-led effort to respond to a White House call-to-action to provide electricity customers with easy access to their energy usage data in a consumer-friendly and computer-friendly format.  The Green Button now also supports Natural Gas- and Water-use data in-addition to Electricity; plus many other things.

Green Button platforms are where energy information is found—whether hosted at a Utility, an Aggregator, or perhaps even from the software that interfaces to a solar array.

Check with your electricity, natural gas, or water Utility to see if they have implemented the Green Button data-download or data-connect sharing methods.

If your utility does not-yet provide the Green Button, let us know—and let them know that you want it.  The Green Button Alliance is here to help make Green Button solutions available to everyone.

The Green Button effort was created with the support of:

• the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE),
• the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST),
• the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP),
• the Utility Communications Architecture International Users Group (UCAIug), and
• the White House.

The North American Energy Standards Board’s Energy Services Provider Interface (NAESB REQ.21 ESPI standard) serves as the basis for Green Button technology by providing a model for business practices, use cases, and and how the standards work together (see the next FAQ for a list of those standards).

The answer is twofold:  Awareness & Mitigation

Awareness:

To enable end-users (consumers of electricity, natural gas, and water) to change behav­iors assoc­iated with usage, those end-users must be aware of their use and their patterns of use.  To do that, they need access to their usage data.  Once they have access, they can take action to reduce their overall usage; deter­mine if solar might be right for them; allow companies and apps to assist in under­standing where improve­ments (e.g., insulation, UV glazing, new appliances, LED lighting, low-flow showerheads) may be able to help them; and even be able to save money where time-of-use (TOU) pricing for elec­tricity provides incen­tives for off-peak shifting of energy consump­tion.

Mitigation:

Aside from the end-users’ benefits, there may be societal and environ­mental benefits to these reduc­tions and peak-shaving actions, where climate-change mitiga­tion starts from measuring one’s impact in order to begin making those changes—whether manually or by automa­tion. Enough collec­tive shifting of use from peak hours of the day may enable a utility to avoid the use of diesel generators to make up the difference.  That may reduce costs for the utility and reduce charges to the end users—all while benefiting the environ­ment.

Take a look at our Green Button Connect My Data page to learn more about the benefits of Green Button CMD to utilities and utility customers.

Green Button CMD

Green Button was designed, from the start, to be very flexible (it can report electricity, natural gas, water, propane, steam, sewerage, methane, … and much more).  The idea was to ensure it was not too prescriptive: let utilities provide the data that they can; rather than make it so hard to implement that no utility would.  Further, different jurisdictions have different needs for their constituencies.  Green Button allows public-utility commissions to choose the ideal selection of features for their needs.

Early implementations (before 2015) were built to the standards but there was no entity testing those implementations, so some were better than others.  The Green Button Alliance was formed in 2015 to help utilities create Green Button platforms for their customers and to help them meet the standards in doing so.  Our DMD Certification program launched later that year and our CMD Certification program launched at the end of 2019.  Due to the covid-19 pandemic, many utilities were slow to go through the Certification process but by the end of 2023 there were over 100 Certified implementations.

To find Utilities offering Green Button to their Customers, look to our Green Button Directory Services℠, released in September 2024. 

Applications, or “apps,” are available from multiple vendors to help homeowners, renters, business owners, and others reach their goals—whether the goal is to install solar, “go net-zero,” shave peak costs in regions with time-of-use (TOU) pricing, reduce environmental footprints, or to simply understand how one property in a portfolio compares to another.

Look to the Green Button Alliance membership for solutions or look to our Green Button Directory Services℠, released in September 2024, for a growing list of Third Party providers of apps and solutions.