Energy Model

Currently being re-constructed. The Town of Eliot has a new Town Manager who embraces the idea of making decision informed by data. This has provided an opportunity for me to refine the model using my latest skills in MS-SQL Server & R and to customize the visualization to suit the Manager’s preferences.

The Eliot Energy Committee was formed in 2010 to meet the town’s goals of improving the energy efficiency of municipal buildings and seek cost-saving opportunities in renewable energy. The committee achieved its goals by relying heavily on data, primarily electricity consumption, to demonstrate how capital improvements reduced the town’s expenses. Each successive project was able to demonstrate its monetary value and the committee was able to expand its budget and the ambition of its projects.

This work culminated in 2019 with a successful Town Warrant to finance the installation of LED street lighting and a 134 KW solar array on its capped landfill. Today 90% of all municipal electricity is generated by renewable energy, an investment that will continue to return value to the town for decades.

In the beginning the data were laboriously extracted by interns and loaded into a series of Excel spreadsheets. As students graduated & volunteers came and went from the committee, the dataset was not consistently maintained and underwent a number of formatting changes.

Analyzing my own electricity consumption, I convinced the committee that maintaining this dataset had value and provided a solution ( online data extraction & loading into a PowerBI model) that could potentially make maintenance of the dataset easier and insights more readily available.

The first iteration of this PowerBI model generated a series of simple dashboards for each of the ( ) town owned meters. The lack of leadership buy-in for this model and data irregularities from the Utility yielded a model that was not as accurate and useful as hoped.

I am excited to work with the new Town Manager and Finance staff to refine this model with the skills I have learned in pursuing a career in Data Analytics. I believe it is a model that I will allow me to deploy new skills and programming languages as I progress in this field.