Illinois Formally Opens Utility Data Access Rulemaking

The Illinois Commerce Commission formally opened a rulemaking to address recent legislation (220 ILCS 33) governing the provision of usage data to customers and other entities at electric and natural gas utilities with more than 100,000 customers

A draft rule appended to the ICC's initiating order provides that a utility, "shall honor an account holder's authorized request to transmit the account holder's covered usage data held by the utility to any entity designated by the account holder".

Under the draft, the covered usage data must be available to be requested online.

The draft further provides that all usage data shall be provided at no cost to the data recipient

The draft rule would also provide that anonymized, aggregated usage data from multiple customer accounts shall not be deemed customer utility usage information, personally identifiable information, or confidential information, and shall not be subject to protections for customer utility usage information, personally identifiable information, or confidential information.

Under the draft, utilities would be required to develop a tool or tools whereby account holders may request building data, or request that the utility transfer their building data to others that account holders designate to receive the information.

Docket 26-0626