The bill directs the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to produce model guidelines that give electricity and natural gas customers — and third-party apps they authorize — programmatic access to meter-level usage, billing, and related customer information. It also adds these access programs to the list of activities eligible under State energy plans and authorizes limited funding to help certified States implement them.
Why it matters: unlocking meter and grid-edge data changes who can build energy-management services, how customers participate in demand response and retail programs, and how wholesale markets might be settled. The bill couples access rules with privacy, technical, and competition guardrails and a directed study on the costs and benefits of using meter data in wholesale settlement.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill requires DOE and FERC to issue joint model data‑sharing guidelines (after stakeholder consultation) that specify machine‑readable, open‑standard access to retail electric and natural gas information, procedures for customer authorization of third parties, protections for privacy and security, and standards for meter‑software platforms. It also enables States to seek DOE certification that their policies meet the guidelines and makes limited federal funding available to certified States.
Who It Affects
Electric and gas utilities that operate meters and grid‑edge devices, third‑party energy service providers and app developers, State energy offices and public utility regulators, owners/operators of meter software platforms, and customers who want to authorize third‑party access to their usage data.
Why It Matters
Establishing a national model for data access and platform behavior aims to accelerate competition in digital energy tools, expand customer choice for energy management and demand response, and surface whether meter‑level data should be used to settle wholesale markets — all while embedding privacy and non‑discrimination requirements.
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What This Bill Actually Does
The bill creates a federal playbook for sharing retail energy data. Within roughly six months of enactment DOE and FERC must jointly publish model guidelines that States can use to set rules requiring utilities to make customer usage, billing, and related meter or grid‑edge information available for customer download or transmission to authorized third parties.
Those guidelines are intended to be technology‑neutral but push for machine‑readable formats, nationally recognized open standards, and protections that address security and customer privacy.
The guidelines are detailed: they prescribe the form and minimum history of data (including an electronic machine‑readable format and at least two years of historical usage), standard consent language and an online authorization flow for customers to grant third‑party access, and expectations about the performance, transparency, and non‑discriminatory terms of meter software platforms. The agencies must consult broadly (including NIST, the FTC, State regulators, utilities, consumer groups, and industry associations) and must revise the guidance periodically to keep pace with technology.To encourage adoption, the bill amends the statutory criteria for State energy plans so that programs promoting competition in digital energy tools qualify; States may submit their policies for DOE certification against the joint guidelines.
Certified States can receive federal assistance to implement such programs, funded from a small one‑time appropriation. Separately, DOE and FERC must deliver a joint report within a year analyzing the costs and benefits of transmitting meter data into covered wholesale electricity markets for settlement, including estimates of customer coverage, reprogramming costs, and effects on participation and reliability.Operational safeguards are baked in: model rules require recognized privacy programs, periodic independent certification of compliance with standards (for example, Green Button Connect My Data or successors), public reporting on authorization processing and onboarding performance, and protections against platform self‑preferencing and other anti‑competitive conduct.
Where aggregate data are published, the guidance requires mathematical protections such as differential privacy (or equivalent measures) to reduce re‑identification risks.The bill stops short of changing jurisdictional market rules directly; instead it sets federal baseline guidance, conditions a pathway for state adoption and funding, and orders a targeted study so policymakers can evaluate whether meter‑level settlement is cost‑effective and practical at scale.
The Five Things You Need to Know
DOE and FERC must issue joint model data‑sharing guidelines within 180 days of enactment after stakeholder consultation.
The guidelines must require utilities to make retail electric and natural gas information available in electronic, machine‑readable form using nationally recognized open standards and include at least 24 months of historical data.
Guidance requires independent certification that utilities adhere to Green Button Connect My Data (or a similar standard) on a periodic basis and sets a system‑availability target for Green Button services (greater than 99% availability without severe errors).
Meter software platforms must offer fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms, disclose uptime and app‑evaluation timelines, and afford app developers due process for disputes.
DOE and FERC must submit a joint report within one year analyzing costs/benefits of using meter data to settle covered wholesale electricity markets, including reprogramming costs, customer coverage, and reliability impacts.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Short title — 'E-Access Act'
Sets the bill's short title, the Access to Consumer Energy Information Act (E‑Access Act). This is purely stylistic but signals the bill's focus on consumer access to energy information.
Definitions for meters, grid‑edge devices, and data types
Provides precise definitions used throughout the bill: 'electric meter software platform', 'grid edge computer', 'grid edge consumer insight', and what counts as 'retail electric energy information' and 'retail natural gas information' (usage, pricing, billing line items, customer identifiers, and eligibility‑related data). These definitions determine the scope of data subject to sharing obligations and the devices to which the platform and app‑rules will apply.
Adds digital energy access programs to State energy plan eligibility
Amends the Energy Policy and Conservation Act to make programs that promote competition in digital energy management tools an explicit part of State energy plans. Practically, this creates a statutory incentive for states to adopt policies aligned with the federal model guidance and enables those programs to qualify for federal support under existing EPCA mechanisms.
DOE–FERC joint guidelines: scope, content, and stakeholder consultation
Directs DOE and FERC to jointly produce model guidelines for States to use to provide customers and authorized third parties access to retail electric and gas data. The bill prescribes the consultation list (State/local regulators, NIST, FTC, utilities, consumer groups, industry bodies), requires notice-and-comment, and enumerates content expectations: machine‑readable open standards, online authorization flows and standardized consent language, minimum data history, privacy and security program compliance, nondiscriminatory third‑party onboarding terms, periodic independent certification to standards like Green Button, public reporting on processing and onboarding performance, meter software platform transparency and nondiscrimination, and protections for publishing aggregated data (e.g., differential privacy). It also mandates periodic (every three years) review and revision of the guidelines to reflect technological and market changes.
State certification and implementation assistance
Allows State energy offices to submit their access policies to DOE for certification that they meet the joint guidelines. Certified States become eligible for implementation assistance; the bill expressly authorizes $10 million (FY2026) to support implementation. This creates a voluntary, carrot‑based adoption pathway rather than a preemptive federal mandate, but links federal funding to conformity with federal model rules.
Report on meter data for wholesale settlement
Directs DOE and FERC to produce a joint report within one year evaluating the costs and benefits of transmitting meter data to covered wholesale electricity markets for settlement. The report must inventory customers with advanced metering, identify capacity that currently lacks meter‑data access for settlement, include case studies and best practices, analyze anticompetitive risks of denying access, estimate public and ratepayer expenditures tied to metering and system support where meter data are not used for wholesale settlement, and estimate reprogramming and market‑operator costs to enable demand‑side participation. The analysis is targeted: it informs whether and how meter data could be incorporated into wholesale market settlement practices.
This bill is one of many.
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Explore Energy in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Residential and commercial energy consumers — gain automated access to meter‑level usage, clearer billing detail, and the ability to authorize third‑party tools that can lower bills or manage load.
- Third‑party developers and energy service providers — receive clearer onboarding expectations, access to open, machine‑readable data, and protections against discriminatory platform behavior that hinder competition.
- State energy offices and regulated utilities in certified States — can use federal guidance and limited federal assistance to deploy standardized data‑access programs and accelerate measured efficiency and demand response programs.
- Demand response aggregators and DER operators — benefit from standardized access to meter‑level data and clearer rules for participation, increasing the pool of customers who can join wholesale programs.
- Wholesale market operators and reliability planners — receive a directed analysis (the required report) that could identify new, verifiable sources of distributed flexibility for reliability if meter data are made usable for settlement.
Who Bears the Cost
- Electric and gas utilities — must build or adapt IT and operational processes to provide machine‑readable exports, implement secure authorization flows, support third‑party onboarding, and subject platforms to certification and public reporting requirements.
- Owners/operators of meter software platforms — face obligations to adopt nondiscriminatory terms, disclose performance metrics and app‑review timelines, and potentially change default application practices that lock in incumbents.
- Independent System Operators/Regional Transmission Organizations — could incur systems and process costs if wholesale settlement practices are changed to accept meter‑level data, and may need to develop new verification and settlement procedures.
- State public utility commissions and regulators — take on oversight duties (reviewing third‑party disqualification, monitoring nondiscrimination claims, and enforcing privacy/security standards) without an explicit federal funding stream for that expanded role.
- Ratepayers and taxpayers — may bear some of the upfront costs of meter reprogramming, platform upgrades, or federal assistance depending on how States and regulators allocate costs between utilities and customers.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central dilemma is access versus protection: making meter and grid‑edge data broadly available unlocks competition, innovation, and potentially greater reliability, but doing so increases privacy and security risk and imposes implementation costs; the bill empowers agencies to set the balance but leaves cost allocation, enforcement resources, and fine‑grained privacy thresholds to future rulemaking and state action.
The bill attempts to thread a narrow needle: expand data access and competition while embedding privacy, security, and non‑discrimination constraints. But it leaves important allocation decisions open.
The requirement that data be machine‑readable and that platforms behave non‑discriminatorily is clear; who ultimately pays for utility IT changes, meter reprogramming, or platform certification is largely left to State processes and regulatory cost‑allocation decisions. That raises the possibility of uneven adoption across States, short‑term rate impacts, and litigation about cost recovery and jurisdictional boundaries.
Privacy protections are built into the guidance, including reliance on recognized privacy programs and mathematical techniques (like differential privacy) before publishing aggregated data. Still, meter‑level data are intrinsically granular, and technical protections are imperfect.
The bill tasks DOE and FERC with balancing availability against privacy, but operational choices—how much aggregation, which privacy thresholds, and tradeoffs between data utility and privacy—will determine whether published datasets remain useful for research and market functions. Finally, anti‑self‑preferencing provisions for platform operators raise enforcement and evidentiary issues: regulators will need to define harmful conduct, measure market effects, and adjudicate disputes over platform practices — tasks that are fact‑intensive and resource‑heavy.
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