Green Button Data

Green Button is the reason your electricity usage is yours to hold, not just yours to be billed for. It is a national standard that makes a utility hand your own data back to you in one common format any tool can read.

What Green Button Is

Green Button began as a 2012 national initiative and became the standard utilities use to release a customer's own energy usage in a single machine-readable format. Before it, your data sat locked inside each utility's portal in whatever shape they chose, readable only there. Green Button fixed the format, so the same file works everywhere and an independent tool can read it without a special arrangement with your utility. ComEd supports it. What it releases is the same interval meter data your monthly bill is summarized from.

Download My Data versus Connect My Data

Green Button comes in two forms, and the difference is worth knowing.

• Download My Data. You sign in, choose a date range, and pull a file yourself. One download, entirely in your hands, shared with no one.
• Connect My Data. You authorize a specific application to receive your data directly from the utility on an ongoing basis, so you do not re-download it each time.

Download My Data is the fastest way to read your own usage once. Connect My Data is the standard behind connected apps. For a single honest read of your load, Download My Data is all you need.

What Is Inside the File

ComEd hands you the export as a .csv, or as an .xml in the ESPI format the standard defines. Either way it is a long list of timestamped readings: the average power you drew in each interval, every thirty minutes, across the range you asked for, going back as far as the last 24 months. That sequence is the record behind every number on your bill. It holds the single interval that set your demand charge and the peak demand that drove it, neither of which the monthly summary keeps.

Reading Your Green Button File

Having the file is not the same as understanding it. A few thousand rows of kilowatts say very little until they are drawn as a load profile. Pull your file first with how to get your ComEd interval data, then drop it into the free analyzer above. It reads your export in the browser, draws your load profile, and shows the load that runs around the clock, whether your heating and cooling are electric, and the interval where your day peaks. Nothing you type, nothing estimated. It reads what the meter recorded, and the file never leaves your browser.