# Ontario Energy Board

> The independent regulator of Ontario's electricity and natural gas sectors — licensing and
> rate-regulating roughly 60 electricity distributors, the province's transmitters, storage and
> generation licensees, unit sub-meter providers, energy retailers and gas marketers, and Enbridge
> Gas. It sits above the wires-and-pipes layer of Canada's largest provincial energy market. It does
> not own assets, does not run the wholesale market (that is IESO) and holds no customer meter data —
> so everything it publishes is regulatory, rate and utility-performance data rather than consumption
> data.

Generated: 2026-07-27 · method: generated · source: apis.yml + repo artifacts, all verified live on 2026-07-27.
The OEB publishes no llms.txt of its own (/llms.txt returns HTTP 404 on www.oeb.ca and www.rds.oeb.ca).

## What actually exists

There is no developer portal, no API key, no signup, no OpenAPI published by the OEB and no terms
click-through. There are two real, anonymous, machine-consumable surfaces:

1. **OEB Open Data** — 40 datasets, 198 published files, served as XML, XLSX and GIS ZIP bundles under
   the Open Government Licence – Ontario. Whole-file downloads only; no query interface.
2. **OEB Regulatory Document Search (RDS)** — a live, undocumented JSON query surface over the Board's
   entire case record, running on Micro Focus / OpenText Content Manager WebDrawer. Add `format=json`
   to the same `Record` URLs the OEB itself links to and you get structured results with typed fields.

On consumer energy data the OEB publishes nothing, because it holds nothing. It is the **supervisor**
of Ontario's Green Button mandate (O. Reg. 633/21), not an obligated party — and it publishes the
implementation register naming 54 confirmed distributors and 6 extensions.

## APIs

- [OEB Open Data](https://www.oeb.ca/ontarios-energy-sector/open-data): Anonymous, key-free downloads of rates, distributor performance scorecards, complaints, RRR filings series, licensed participants, open applications and GIS service areas.
- [OEB Regulatory Document Search](https://www.oeb.ca/rds): Every filing, decision, order, licence and piece of correspondence in the Board's case record. Base: https://www.rds.oeb.ca/CMWebDrawer

## Specs (generated by API Evangelist — the OEB publishes none)

- [OEB Open Data OpenAPI](openapi/ontario-energy-board-open-data-openapi.yml): 33 operations, each carrying x-evidence with the probed URL, status, bytes and Last-Modified.
- [OEB RDS OpenAPI](openapi/ontario-energy-board-rds-openapi.yml): 5 operations — record search, record detail (returns 500 anonymously), document download, and the two search-metadata endpoints.
- [RDS record search JSON Schema](json-schema/ontario-energy-board-rds-record-search-response.json)
- [Open Data overlay](overlays/ontario-energy-board-open-data-overlay.yaml) · [RDS overlay](overlays/ontario-energy-board-rds-overlay.yaml)

## The one contract the OEB really does serve

- [RDS search clause vocabulary](vocabulary/ontario-energy-board-rds-search-clauses.yml): 303 search clauses — 62 of them the OEB's own regulatory fields (CaseNumber, EnergyType, Applicant, PrimaryApplicationType, SIDocumentType, DateIssued) — fetched live from https://www.rds.oeb.ca/CMWebDrawer/Help/WDSearchClauseDefJS?trimType=Record. Not a /.well-known document, but the only genuinely machine-readable contract on any OEB host.

## Artifacts

- [Authentication](authentication/ontario-energy-board-authentication.yml): none, on both surfaces, verified.
- [Conventions](conventions/ontario-energy-board-conventions.yml): query language, offset pagination, caching, media types, versioning, licensing.
- [Error catalog](errors/ontario-energy-board-problem-types.yml): seven observed failure modes, including the critical one below.
- [Data model](data-model/ontario-energy-board-data-model.yml): the Record/Case/Location graph, the Open Data entity set, and the complete 40-dataset / 198-file inventory.
- [Lifecycle](lifecycle/ontario-energy-board-lifecycle.yml): filename versioning, no deprecation policy, no SLA, no status page.
- [Changelog](changelog/ontario-energy-board-changelog.yml): the three dated Open Data programme letters (2022, 2023, 2024) plus observed file freshness.
- [Conformance](conformance/ontario-energy-board-conformance.yml): open-government instruments yes; API/discovery/error standards no.
- [Domain security](security/ontario-energy-board-domain-security.yml): TLSv1.3, HSTS preload, SPF+DMARC quarantine; no DNSSEC, no CAA.
- [Well-known](well-known/ontario-energy-board-well-known.yml): every /.well-known path is a 404 on both hosts.
- [Packages](packages/ontario-energy-board-packages.yml): no SDK, no GitHub org, in any registry.
- [MCP candidate](mcp/ontario-energy-board-mcp.yml): no server is published; a candidate 10-tool design is recorded, and no MCPServer pointer is claimed.
- [Agent skills](skills/_index.yml): three packaged flows over verified operationIds.

## Two things that will break your integration

1. **HTTP 200 does not mean your RDS query worked.** An unknown search clause, or a wildcard used with
   `=`, returns 200 with an empty `Results` array and the reason in plain English in `SearchTitle`. A
   client that checks only the status code reads "unknown search method" as "no records matched".
2. **www.oeb.ca throttles by going silent.** No 429, no Retry-After, no published limit — the host
   simply stops answering under parallel fetching (observed at ~200 requests in 20 minutes,
   2026-07-27), then recovers. Fetch Open Data serially and cache against Last-Modified.

And one that will make you read stale data: Open Data files are versioned by **filename**
(`scorecard_data_2024.xml`, `open-data-electricity-map-20260429.zip`). A refresh gets a new name while
the old URL keeps serving the old bytes. Re-resolve from the dataset page before every scheduled fetch.

## Docs

- [Open Data programme](https://www.oeb.ca/ontarios-energy-sector/open-data)
- [Open Data XML-to-Excel guide (PDF)](https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/Open-Data-Guide-XML-Excel-20221215.pdf) — the only developer-facing documentation that exists, and it targets Excel
- [Open Government Licence – Ontario](https://www.ontario.ca/page/open-government-licence-ontario) — attribution required
- [Green Button at the OEB](https://www.oeb.ca/green-button) · [Implementation status register (PDF)](https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/Green-Button-implementation-status-summary.pdf)
- [Licensed companies](https://www.oeb.ca/ontarios-energy-sector/list-licensed-companies)
- [Contact](https://www.oeb.ca/contact-ontario-energy-board) · [Legal and privacy statements](https://www.oeb.ca/legal-privacy-statements) · [Accessibility](https://www.oeb.ca/accessibility-ontario-energy-board)