Open access to your energy data

I sit on the UK Govt. Midata "Energy Sector Board" - who's remit is to provide better access to energy bill and consumption information to consumers.

I'm curious to hear your opinions about the UK and USA's plans to open up access to consumer energy data - to consumers.

1) What are the benefits to you, to business, to governments?

2) What are the barriers?

3) What should might we be concerned about?

Rob Sheppard

To answer all three with one - the potential benefit, potential barrier and real concern I have on the availability of this data is how understandable the data I end up with will be.

I can understand my bank statement - I know to look at my balance and tally this with the time to the end of the month to know how I'm doing.

But my water, gas and electricity bills are just opaque, there is a total cost number but the breakdown of fixed elements, variable elements and additional charges is very hard to get to grips with, and different with every supplier.

When I see that the price has gone up I can't easily tell how much is me using more, how much is price changes and how much it just a factor of the time of year that the bill relates to.

Somehow there needs to be a clearer way for me to understand the data before I can act on it.

All power to you if you can get a clear standard that I can understand - then I'm empowered to act on my energy usage and compare the energy companies in an objective way.

Good Luck

gavin

The US has been pushing out the "Green Button" that enable consumers to get access to XML versions of their bill data - but that doesn't let us automate ongoing access to provide this kind of intelligence (and consumers don't know what XML is) - so we'd need to have an ongoing set of integrations with each utility and go site-to-site.

To truly automate insight into your bills, I believe we need automated machine-access to the data, using standards like oAuth, CSV and XML ...  then anyone can start to build apps that drill into specific insights, and community tools to power collaborative purchasing, usage, and action to become more efficient....

Companies like uSwitch can help to drill into the costs, but they can only go so far with the currently available data.

If there was a really compelling application that told you about you consumption, your street, and your town, could you see yourself "checking in" every week to check progress?