Ontario Canada will be able to pull their data from Green Button

Good news that Ontario residents will in the coming months/years grab their data

https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1001086/ontario-helping-energy-customers-save-money-with-green-button

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@digiital, thank you for the link! I just read the details and found out that I’m fortunate enough to live in an area of Ontario where the Green Button is already deployed. YEAH! Time to see if my data can be integrated with HA.

Any luck integrating into HA?

my local hydro company went live on green button today. are there any plans for the integration?

We’d first need proper support to import historical data. Current implementations of any historical utility company data mess directly with the database, which is not very safe.

See Import old energy readings for use in energy dashboard

We had a bit of a discussion around this here: Scraping Alectra Utilities Power Website - #8 by FelixKa

The green button spec is supposed to allow you to subscribe to the XML feed, perhaps that is a direction to investigate?

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My electric utility has the green button available through a API

https://greenbutton.consumersenergy.com/

So I’m supportive of getting an integration the sooner the better.

I would just be happy with the current month going forward. But to pull all data for analysis would be great but be separate issue.

Even a automated script to login to your account and pull data for (year/month/day), once a month in the XML format would be a great start.

As of Nov.1 2023 all of Ontario utilities should support Green button data access, as that was the deadline set in 2021. My utility of course waited until the very last day to roll this out.

Seems like the number of consumer meters with access to this format is now well into the millions (counting households only, not individuals)

I’m with Hydro One and this is on their website.
“Green Button download service is currently unavailable. Please try again later.”
It’s been like that for a while.

I’m with Oakville Hydro and they have the same message.

That being said, it does allow you to download the data set in various time intervals, like last 7 days, already.

But HA still doesn’t seem to allow importing the data without SQL hacking so I’m not sure it helps that much.

I’m kind of surprised that this is still such a mess. It’s been 2 years of discussing green button and historical data import and there’s been zero progress on any of it.

I might just hack together my own solution, tired of waiting.

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Ontatio Hydro green button is live. doesnt look liek there are any connect apps available yet, and I have not found a way to import the xml into HA.

Has anyone found an integration to either pull or being able to import historics?

Just like everyone else I am also looking for an easy way to import my Green Button data in HA.

I am with Milton Hydro and their Green Button portal is broken, there is no info on how to get my data and Customer Service is not much help.

However I was able to download my last 2 year gas usage data from Enbridge. Now I need a way to interprets the XML data and add in a db :slight_smile: File size is about 80KB.

Looking at the xml file, the actual meter reading/data is not in the file. Data is behind the api.enbridgegas.com links and requires setting up api authorization.

The Green Button appears to be way over complicated for regular home user who wants their data in HA or similar solution.

Alternate: Capture your own data.

  • Setup a SDR and capture the data transmitted by the utility meter(s). Send it to InfluxDB. Display on Energy dashboards. Plenty of YouTube videos on SDR capture. Equipment cost is $50-75.
  • There is also the “screen capture” option. Search YouTube for How Artificial Intelligence Can Automate Reading Your Water Meter In Home Assistant

I wanted to share that Xcel in Colorado has this green button for download and connect. It appears that this is being pushed by the US Gov and rolling out quickly. Canada is not alone with this data now.

I currently have data rolling into home assistant from my solar gateway as well as a Sense monitor. This data from my utility should have more data about the actual cost, especially regarding the time of use rates. I hope this would not be uselessly redundant for me.

This appears to be another situation where the utilities have no incentive to make this accessible to Joe User.

I’m in Ottawa and started looking at this a couple of days ago. The reading that I have done so far is discouraging and frustrating. Although the electrical (Ottawa Hydro) and gas (Enbridge) utilities have started offering the ability to download historical usage data, the more desirable data set (ie current meter readings) requires creating some kind of account with a third-party data warehousers. Then you give this third-party permission to use your data in order to get access to your data. Things that make me say “hmmmm…”. When I went to the third-party web sites, there was no obvious way to begin the authorization process. Frustrating.

Then I started looking at RTL-SDR capture. The electrical meter in Ottawa appears to be a mesh-network type which may or may not encrypt the data stream. Couldn’t see a way to determine without trying. The gas meter documentation that I could find was inconclusive. The only thing I might be able to read via RTL-SDR is the water meter.

If anyone can point me to more resources, I would be grateful.

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with hydro one, not ottawa hydro, but the hydro and gas meters we have are not accessible with an SDR. however, you can capture your city of Ottawa water meter, but only at the 1000 L resolution. not super helpful to be honest.

break break, I ended up using the SDR as a adsb recevier, much more nerdy, just as useless for HA.

I was actually googling this and I am in Milton lol as well. The Green Button data download now works but like you said, the XML is pretty complicated.

Toronto Hydro appears to be accepting Connect My Data requests:
https://www.torontohydro.com/for-home/green-button

I downloaded XML data for my house from Hydro Ottawa for one day. I parsed it with XML to JSON Converter Online to convert XML to JSON String, URL and File. I could see it has lots of information. Consumption numbers seem to have 2 significant digits, with a published “powerOfTenMultiplier”: -6, so 0.01kWh resolution, precise enough.
It includes 24 “IntervalReading” (every hour) with a sample value of 490000 (see code block below), which is 0.49kWh, matching my daily consumption ‘candle’ for that time period from My Account info. Correlating XML data with My Account info, first XML reading is at 8pm on the previous day, and the 24th reading is the 7pm reading on the current day. This looks promising. Just need to figure-out how to have Ottawa Hydro let me register as a 3rd party entity.

            {
                "cost": 40,
                "ReadingQuality": {
                  "quality": 0
                },
                "timePeriod": {
                  "duration": 3600,
                  "start": 1709290800
                },
                "value": 490000,
                "tou": 3
              },

I emailed them so will see if they will grant me access.

If they do, then a simple Node-Red flow could mine the XML for data and publish-it to my MQTT broker for easy incorporation into HA.

I’m getting a resolution of 1L with my I-Tron 100WR device, in Ottawa. SDR → metermon docker container → MQTT → HA. Works quite well.

hey, did you get lucky with HydroOttawa? I’ve seen scrapers for some of this data in the past, it’d be nice being able to get official access from them.

A problem I think with the data as you mentioned is that it covers the previous day, it’d be great if home assistant had a way of retroactively store yesterday’s data.

I emailed the Ontario Energy Board asking if it’s possible to use “Green Button” (somehow?) to query my information. Will report back if I hear from them.