Ontario public sector reporting
Broader public sector energy reporting in Ontario, without the data entry
Every year, Ontario school boards, municipalities, hospitals, colleges and universities report the energy use of their buildings to the Ministry of Energy and Mines under Ontario Regulation 25/23. The reporting itself happens in ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager®. Most of the work happens before that: collecting and entering a year of electricity and natural gas bills for every site.
EnergyExtract turns those bills into clean data and Portfolio Manager upload files, so the annual report starts from a complete year instead of a stack of PDFs.
The requirement at a glance
| Who reports | Municipalities and municipal service boards, school boards, public hospitals, colleges and universities. |
|---|---|
| What | Energy use for each of their properties of a prescribed operation type, regardless of size. Municipalities with water or sewage treatment facilities also report the volume treated. |
| When | Every year by July 1, for the previous calendar year. School boards report on the school year (September 1 to August 31). |
| How | Usage is entered in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager and submitted through the Ministry of Energy and Mines’ annual data request link. |
| Also required | A Conservation and Demand Management (CDM) plan every five years, posted on the organization’s website. The latest round was due in July 2024. |
Where the time goes
A school board or municipality can have dozens or hundreds of sites, each with its own electricity and natural gas accounts, and sometimes several meters per site. Bills arrive monthly from different utilities in different layouts. Before anything is reported, someone has to gather them, check that every month is there, spot rebills and estimated reads, and type the dates and usage into Portfolio Manager for every meter.
Missing or duplicated months are easy to miss and hard to find later, and the work tends to land in the weeks before the July 1 deadline.
How EnergyExtract helps
Every bill, every site
Upload electricity, natural gas and water bills for all your sites in one go, from Hydro One, Toronto Hydro, Alectra, Enbridge and any other utility. Multi-bill PDFs are split automatically.
Organized by property
Bills are grouped by service address and account, and properties can be grouped into portfolios, for example by school family or by department.
Gaps and duplicates found
Missing billing periods and duplicate bills are flagged for each account, so a full year is complete before it goes to Portfolio Manager.
Ready for Portfolio Manager
One click creates a Portfolio Manager spreadsheet for every meter, with the bills’ dates, usage and cost, ready to upload.
Data for your CDM plan
Standardized Excel exports of consumption and cost by building and utility, for the baseline and targets in your next Conservation and Demand Management plan.
More on the Portfolio Manager step: uploading utility bills to ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager.
Questions
Does EnergyExtract submit the report for us?
No. The report is submitted from your Portfolio Manager account through the ministry’s annual data request link. EnergyExtract handles the slow part before that: getting a complete, accurate year of bills into Portfolio Manager.
We report on the school year, not the calendar year. Does that matter?
No. Upload every bill for each meter; Portfolio Manager uses the dates on each bill to report whichever period the ministry’s data request asks for.
Is this the same as EWRB?
No. Ontario’s Energy and Water Reporting and Benchmarking (EWRB) program covers large private-sector buildings and exempts publicly owned buildings. Broader public sector organizations report under O. Reg. 25/23 instead. Both use Portfolio Manager.
How many bills does it take?
A school board or municipality with 100 sites and separate electricity and gas accounts receives about 2,400 bills a year. Uploads can be done in bulk, and exports include up to 3,000 bills at a time.
Where is our data stored?
In isolated, encrypted storage on Amazon Web Services. See the privacy FAQ for details on storage, retention and the AI processing.
Start this year's report from complete data
12 free credits on signup, no credit card required. For larger portfolios, book a demo and we'll walk through your sites.
This page summarizes the requirement; check the ministry's guidance for your organization. Sources: Ontario, Broader public sector energy reporting; Guide to energy reporting: who needs to report; O. Reg. 25/23; Ontario, EWRB. ENERGY STAR and Portfolio Manager are registered trademarks of the U.S. EPA; EnergyExtract is not affiliated with the EPA, Natural Resources Canada or the Government of Ontario.