Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to present this morning. My name is Zoran Stojanovic, and I'm Director of Information Services at London Hydro.
I want to thank you for an amazingly good introduction to the topic I'm going to talk about, and that's data transparency and how we can help our customers.
I'm going to bring the view of what data transparency means to our consumers and our customers—especially our commercial customers, who really need this data to make efficiencies and save on costs.
The fact is that North American utilities daily store a variety of data that are utilized for grid monitoring, bill production, customer engagement, education programs, and so on. Typically this data among utilities is stored in isolated databases such as their operational data stores, and it's not easily shared. It's not transparent to all the ecosystem, which includes customers, government organizations, and research organizations.
The fact is that a wealth of data exists, and it's growing among utilities. However, challenges remain for effective sharing, authorization, and utilization of this data, of this tremendous resource, on a consolidated cross-utility level.
Take Ontario, where we have just over 60 utilities. If you're a customer such as a school board, with facilities across six or seven utilities, it's pretty impossible to obtain the data in a standardized, transparent format to manage your portfolio. These are real challenges for real customers.
I'd now like to introduce an initiative that we've been spearheading since inception and that came as part of the data transparency in the call to action from the U.S., and that's Green Button.
Green Button is a standard based on a common technical standard called Energy Services Provider Interface. It is a collection of existing proven standards and it's capable of supporting any time series data, energy data, and any attributes of that data, including real time data. We talked about thermostats and how customer behaviours are changing. Green Button is capable of storing the data.
The most important thing is that it puts customers in the driver's seat. As a customer, if you had the ability to leverage this data with an easy process and authorize in anonymous ways anybody to leverage and provide value, you would do so. With what I call the Green Button initiative, customers are able to leverage a simple authorization process and view their data, which allows them to save on time and cost while helping to save the environment.
To bring you back a little bit to what we've done in Ontario, we have successfully implemented pilot programs, we have delivered a cost-benefit analysis for implementation of the Green Button platforms as the standard across the whole province, and we currently have a proposal pending for province-wide implementation of Green Button.
Furthermore, I'd like to say that at London Hydro we've been spearheading the development of a platform that allows us to share what we have among utilities so that they can collaborate and share the resources, because we do share customers at the end of the day.
In closing, we see Green Button as an enabler and an innovation catalyst that creates the foundation for an open data economy in the energy space. We believe greater benefits can be achieved if everybody adopts the standard nationally for all types of energy data.
I'd like to tie this up by saying that Green Button offers the opportunity to put Canada back on the map of leaders in data transparency.
Thank you.