Dive Brief:
- Illinois is considering the question of who owns a customer's energy usage data: the utility or customer?
- The ability to pass detailed data to third parties means customers can adjust their usage more efficiently, saving money and power.
- Ratepayer advocates have proposed a framework that specifies customer ownership of usage data, with the ability to authorize and revoke third parties access to that data.
Dive Insight:
By now, it's a familiar question for Americans: Who owns the data? But this debate isn't about Facebook, Amazon or your credit card. The Illinois Commerce Commission has opened a proceeding to consider the issue, with a goal of ensuring information needed to make energy consumption more efficient can easily be delivered where it s needed.
Citizens Utility Board and the Environmental Defense Fund have proposed a framework with several primary components, chief among them that the customer, not the utility, controls their own data and can grant or revoke access. The groups also say the data must be available at a sufficient frequency, and delivered close to real time.
A status hearing is scheduled for today regarding the groups' proposed Illinois Open Data Access Framework. The proceeding is slated for completion in early 2015, before utility smart grid deployment plans are scrutinized as part of utilities annual reviews.
