Efforts to secure aggregated energy and water use data from tenant utility accounts typically cast commercial asset managers into a regulatory labyrinth with myriad administrative hurdles and some sudden dead ends. Three prominent industry organizations — the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) of Canada, the Canada Green Building Council (CAGBC) and the Real Property Association of Canada (REALPAC) — are now jointly advocating for a simplified process.
“Building owners are being asked to report on and manage whole-building performance, but they don’t control the underlying data,” observes Brett Kerrigan, a senior research lead with the consulting firm, Dunsky Energy + Climate Advisors, who has been assisting BOMA Canada on the initiative. “They have investors asking hard questions, and it just remains difficult to get their hands on whole-building data and get tenant approval to access that data.”
Thus far, BOMA Canada has been collecting insight from commercial real estate players and the utilities that hold a vast trove of metering and billing data. Those findings underpin a proposed framework for a national policy on utility data access, which was presented during a special session at BOMA Canada’s 2026 national conference in Ottawa earlier this fall.
“Our research is to get an understanding of what the issues are and how we can work with the regulators and the utilities toward more progressive data policies,” Bala Gnanam, BOMA Canada’s vice president, sustainability, advocacy and stakeholder relations, told the gathering. “We want to identify the next tactical steps we can take and put forward some policy solutions.”
Currently, utilities can release aggregated real-time and historical metering data to a facility-level entity if commercial account holders within that facility provide authorization. The proposed national policy would begin with the premise that commercial building owners have a right to obtain whole-building utility data. It would also include consistent Canada-wide standards to govern how requests are submitted, the type and granularity of data to be made available and the interoperability of its formatting.
Supporters of those objectives joined the discussion to outline existing impediments that are rooted in Canada’s constitutional division of powers, utility rate-setting structures and ill-defined privacy laws. More optimistically, panellists representing commercial real estate interests, utilities and the federal government also pointed to some recent progress in collaboratively tackling those issues.
Decision-making layers and boundaries
Brent Gilmour, chief commercial officer with CAGBC, noted that utilities are beholden to their provincial/territorial regulators and given little guidance on privacy considerations. That’s even the case in Ontario where owners/managers of commercial and multifamily buildings 50,000 square feet or larger are compelled under a regulation of the Electricity Act to annually report energy and water consumption via Energy Star Portfolio Manager.
Data seekers confront rules and processes that have filtered through three levels of governance, none of which are necessarily attuned to commercial real estate’s business imperatives. Provincial/territorial governments set energy policy in statutes and enabling regulations; their associated regulatory bodies (i.e. the Ontario Energy Board or Alberta Utilities Commission) interpret and enforce that intent; and utilities are expected to operate within the parameters their regulators have approved. At the top of that pyramid, initial Ministerial responses to BOMA Canada, CAGBC and REALPAC’s entreaties indicate there is sympathy, but not a lot of compelling political traction.
“For the most part, they all saw that there is an issue. The reality check for them is: it’s not consumer-led; it’s not voter-led so why should they care?” Gilmour reported. “We’ve got a very multi-layered system and those in the utilities segment have to respond to who controls and manages them — their regulator. The policy has to change at the Ministerial level.”
From the utility perspective, Trevor Freeman, manager of commercial accounts and program delivery with Hydro Ottawa, concurred that a national policy validating building owners’ right to whole-building data could provide assurance to “risk-adverse” utilities that they have leeway to fulfill data requests. Beyond that, he suggested they need more regulatory guidance, resources to perform the task and sufficient demand to make it worthwhile.
“We have to argue everything we do to our regulator. We have to go to our regulator to explain how we want to spend the dollars that we get from our ratepayers and we have justify every single one of those dollars,” Freeman said. “It’s hard for us to put issues like data ahead of other pressing issues and say to our regulator: We want to raise rates so we can do this. There’s not a lot of incentive and not a lot of backing for us to do that.”
Proactive, but siloed initiatives
That said, Hydro Ottawa has been a leader among Ontario utilities in making data available. All commercial account holders have access to historical interval meter data beginning at the date their meters were installed. The utility also provides manually aggregated whole-building data to owners for their energy and water reporting and benchmarking (EWRB) obligation at no charge, and is preparing to launch a new automated tool that will deliver the information to approved customers through an online portal, beginning in 2027.
Services related to whole-building data are attributable to Hydro Ottawa’s internal decision-making and willingness to make a case to the regulator that the data should be freely available to the designated building owners who are mandated to report it. Other utilities abide by the more general interpretation that they are prohibited from providing resources that are funded across the entire rate base for the benefit of just a subset of customers.
“How we’re going to provide data, what our online tools are going to be for our customers, that’s up to each utility right now,” Freeman advised. “We’ve got great ideas at Hydro Ottawa and we talk to our peer utilities as well, but that’s different from centralized standardization about how data needs to flow and how that’s going to be funded so utilities are not having to go to their customers to say: Sorry, you’re going to have to pay for that.”
Looking west, Trina Kennedy, senior buildings program officer with the federal government’s Office of Energy Efficiency, commended B.C. Hydro as a leader in both its online provision of aggregated, historical energy consumption data for registered commercial, multifamily and mixed-use buildings, and its assistance to other utilities that have launched similar programs.
Making the case
“For the federal government, it is extremely important that building owners access their energy data in an automated fashion for free — not paying anybody to access this information or to get an inclined interface that actually makes this information make sense,” Kennedy reiterated.
That’s not something it has the constitutional authority to mandate, however. Provincial/territorial governments will have to undertake any required legislative steps, but the Office of Energy Efficiency (which was recently transferred from the auspices of Natural Resources Canada to Environment and Climate Change Canada) endorses the concept of standardized national guidance.
Its supportive contributions include soon-to-be-released research, developed in tandem with KPMG, exploring privacy concerns and counterbalancing rationale for a more open approach to disseminating whole-building data from commercial accounts. Hinting at the associated recommendations, Kennedy urged proponents to convey consistent and strategic messaging to decision-makers.
“They’re not quite understanding what the point is and what we’re trying to do. A lot of them think it’s about GHG emissions reductions. They don’t understand that we’re actually developing an economy based on this data and actually trying to make the grid function better,” she said. “That’s a lot stronger argument right now than just GHG emissions. These are aspects that we haven’t focused on in the past that we can bring to their attention now.”
“It’s all about the value proposition,” Kerrigan agreed. “If data is flowing, services can be built upon that data that make it easier for folks to identify projects and get projects out of the starting blocks. It’s good for the economy.”
The work continues and stakeholder input is welcomed through any of the three collaborating industry organizations.
