Here's the thing. I have a Nest. If I had ecobee, I would be out there saying, “Here, have my information.”
There are a couple of things here, and you've touched on something that is very important. There is the data, and the data is just about energy consumption. What you really need to do is pair the data with an address—that energy consumption happened at that place. Then you need to add in the data of what that place looks like, for example, the property assessment information about it being a 2,500 square foot dwelling that was built in the 1940s. If you then begin to ask how that pattern changes over time and everything.... You have to be dealing with private information to start making sense out of it, so you need a safe place to do that work where you're still dealing with private information.
An individual user of energy may not give consent. What you need is that framework that says if you're going to play around with personal information, you do it in a safe place. Stats Canada is a safe place. The utilities are safe places. Quite simply, they have the data anyway, because they have to create bills. You create that safe place, and then you tell people that the data will be protected, and that the people who will be looking at that data will have the highest level of secrecy and be held to the highest standards. Once you have all this information, you don't need to report it out as an individual. You can report it out as a neighbourhood, or as a town or a village. You can then start saying that all of the houses in this community that were built in the 1940s are using a certain energy profile. That is why it's really important to have the big picture and the data in that safe place, so it can be analyzed.
The value of the independent, volunteered data is that you can probably start teasing out of people how many people are in the home, how many of them are teenagers. That makes a difference. You then begin to move into a whole lot deeper analysis that, quite frankly, might be a little creepy—having people doing a lot of that stuff without volunteered consent. But as soon as you can start getting that, you can start getting energy patterns. They may not be absolutely normal, but if you're getting people who have different family types, you can begin to make some sense out of that.
There is a lot of work and useful things that can be done from both approaches.