Data standards are the railway gauges of the 21st century. With more adoption of the ‘Green Button,’ are we about to see an explosion of innovation around energy data?

Today, the Obama Administration announced that nine major utilities and electricity suppliers have committed to using and extending the Green Button to enable some 15 million additional households to access data about their energy usage, creating a potential market of 27 million households for energy apps.

As with the Blue Button for healthcare data, the White House asserts that providing energy consumers with secure access to information about energy usage will increase innovation in the sector and empower citizens with more information.

“This is the kind of innovation that gets me excited,” wrote venture capitalist Fred Wilson earlier this year. “The Green Button is like OAuth for energy data. It is a simple standard that the utilities can implement on one side and web/mobile developers can implement on the other side. And the result is a ton of information sharing about energy consumption and in all likelihood energy savings that result from more informed consumers.”

The thinking here, as with Blue Button, which enables veterans (and soon all federal workers) to download their personal health data, is that broad adoption by utilities and engagement with industry will lead to new opportunities for software developers and civic entrepreneurs to serve a new market of millions of consumers who want better tools to analyze and manage their energy data.

To stimulate app creation, the U.S Department of Energy announced an Apps for Energy challenge today. This effort is meant to “change the way you think about your utility bill data,” wrote data integration specialist Matthew Loveless at the DoE blog:

With the Energy Department’s new Apps for Energy competition, we’re challenging developers to use the Green Button data access program to bring residential and commercial utility data to life.

The Energy Department – in partnership with Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Itron, and Gridwise Alliance – is offering $100,000 in cash prizes to the software developers and designers that submit the best apps, as judged by a prestigious panel of judges selected from government, the energy industry, and the tech community.

Apps for ENERGY leverages Green Button, an initiative that gives access to energy usage data in a streamlined and easy-to-understand format (learn more about the Green Button open standard here). In addition to leveraging Green Button, app developers are encouraged to combine data from a variety of sources to present a complete picture of the customer’s energy usage.

The competition is all about creating tools and products that help consumers get the most out of their Green Button data – from apps that track personal energy savings goals to software that helps businesses optimize building energy usage. In addition, the 27 million households that will have access to Green Button data by the end of the year represent an untapped market that can serve as a catalyst for an active, energy focused developer community.

Apps for Energy will join over one hundred other challenges on Challenge.gov next month.