Illinois condo and co-op boards get a statutory right to whole-building electric data
Illinois condo and co-op boards get a statutory right to whole-building electric data
2026-09-10 · Illinois · Legislation
What happened. SB 25, an omnibus energy act carrying the misleading shell title “SWIMMING FACILITY COLD SPA,” was signed January 8, 2026 as Public Act 104-0458, effective June 1, 2026. Three pieces of it reach Illinois community associations, and the first solves a problem boards have complained about for years.1
The Utility Data Access Act names your board
Article 5 creates a new Utility Data Access Act. Among the “data recipients” it names is “the board, in the case of a condominium or cooperative ownership of the property or building.” It defines “property” to include “2 or more tax parcels held in the cooperative or condominium form of ownership and governed by a single board of managers” — which captures the multi-parcel campus association as well as the single high-rise.
Where a building or property meets the aggregation threshold — three or more unique nonresidential qualified accounts, or any combination of five or more residential and nonresidential accounts — the board may request aggregated usage data from a covered utility, meaning an electric public utility with more than 500,000 Illinois customers.
The timetable and the delivery obligation
The Illinois Commerce Commission must open a rulemaking within 90 days of the effective date and adopt procedures within 2 years. Utilities must retain usage data for 5 years or as long as it remains in the active billing system, whichever is longer, and must deliver requested data within 30 days of a valid request — uploaded directly to ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager or another ICC-approved format.
That Portfolio Manager detail is the one that saves real work. Chicago associations in buildings of 50,000 square feet or more already have to report through Portfolio Manager under the city's benchmarking ordinance, and the historic obstacle has been assembling whole-building consumption from individually metered units. The statutory right and the direct upload address exactly that.
Why boards could not get this data before
Because usage data belongs to the account holder. An association wanting whole-building consumption had to collect individual authorizations from every owner and tenant, which fails at the first refusal and has to be redone as units turn over. Aggregation above a threshold is the standard answer to that problem, and Illinois has now adopted it.
The uses are concrete: energy audits, a retrofit financing package that requires baseline consumption, a bulk-purchase electricity deal, benchmarking compliance, and reserve planning that treats mechanical replacement against actual load rather than nameplate capacity.
EV charging: the rebate runs to 2029
The Act amends 20 ILCS 627/55 and moves the charging rebate program's repeal date to January 1, 2029. The Illinois EPA may award rebates or grants funding up to 80% of the cost of installing Level 2 or Level 3 charging stations to public and private organizations, with additional per-port incentives in eligible communities, applications on a rolling basis and awards within 60 days.
The condition that changes the bid: the installation must comply with the Prevailing Wage Act. An association modelling an 80% rebate against a non-prevailing-wage contractor quote is comparing the wrong numbers. Get both quotes before deciding whether the rebate is worth pursuing — for a small installation the wage differential can consume much of the benefit, and for a large one it rarely does.
Separately, 20 ILCS 627/20 was repealed by P.A. 104-0435, effective November 21, 2025.
One provision that does not apply to you
New 805 ILCS 105/108.22 imposes website, bylaw, meeting-agenda, minutes-within-30-days and director-election-transparency duties on distribution electric cooperatives. Both electric cooperatives and residential community associations are General Not For Profit Corporation Act entities, and the section has been misread on that basis. It does not reach residential associations. The association website duty is a different statute entirely, with a different deadline.
What to do now
Nothing is available until the ICC rules land, and the outer bound for that is mid-2028. But two things are worth doing in the meantime: confirm whether your building meets the five-account aggregation threshold (nearly every multi-unit association will), and if a retrofit, audit or benchmarking obligation is on the horizon, plan for the data request rather than another authorization drive.
What to watch next
The ICC rulemaking docket. The statute sets the right; the rules will set the request procedure, the format, and what a “valid request” from a board has to contain.
Related Illinois HOA Topics
Stay on top of Illinois HOA law
Every week: new Illinois legislation, court rulings, and regulatory developments affecting condos, planned communities, and property managers. Free.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.