Eliot Energy Model
new leadership
= new approaches
Eliot Energy Data Dashboard & Model
Background (2010-2018):
Eliot, Maine is a small town (pop ~6,700) located in southern Maine. The government of Eliot is small, staffing is limited, and the Town relies heavily on volunteers to perform special projects and implement new initiatives.
In Maine, citizens direct their local governments on long-range goals through the development of Comprehensive Plans. The last Comprehensive Plan (2009) included a directive that “the Town of Eliot should undertake a leadership role in the conservation of energy”.
An Energy Commission was created “as a result of increased community interest in sustainability and conservation as well as concern about potential harm to the global environment.”
Over the next decade, a series of Energy Commission (Commission) volunteers compiled data relating to municipal energy consumption in Excel spreadsheets. The Commission proposed and successfully implemented a series of energy conservation measures on municipal buildings and the installation of a solar array on a municipal (Department of Public Works) building in 2013. These spreadsheets provided the opportunity to illustrate quantitative measures of success for these initiatives and were critical for getting support for each successive proposal from the Board of Selectmen, the Budget Committee and voters.
After a series of incremental weatherization and energy efficiency upgrades to municipal buildings, the Energy Commission took on three large impactful projects in 2017-2018, the conversion of streetlighting to LEDs, the replacement of the Town Hall propane boiler with Mitsubishi Hi2 heat pumps and the installation of a 134 KW ground-mounted solar array on the capped landfill.
The Energy dataset and the analysis the Energy Commission performed with multiple static spreadsheets drove the municipal decision to support all three of these projects.
June 2018 Ballot Sign
2019 Punchlist Complete - where do we go from here:
2019 - Success!
Now what?
With the streetlights converted to LEDs, heat pumps installed at Town Hall and the Landfill Solar array tied to the grid on 12/24/2018, the Energy Commission started 2019 wondering “where do we go from here”. The Commission ranks had dwindled to just a handful and the work reduced to monitoring installed systems.
The Commission voted to change its focus toward recommending and contracting for maintenance and upgrades of existing facilities as well as tackling the long-discussed expansion of Town Hall. I had begun to explore a career shift into Data Analytics and put together a demonstration of Power BI and a dashboard using our data.
The Commission saw this as an opportunity to implement its long-held goal of transferring the responsibility of routine data collection from volunteers to Town staff. The Town Manager at the time agreed that if we could build the model and a user manual, our bright young Finance Director could easily maintain and manage it.
2019 Demonstration Dashboard
2019-to date:
The Town of Eliot has a Select Board form of government which means that the Town Manager proposes a budget and a committee of elected volunteers review it and make recommendations to the legislative body (citizens). The Eliot Budget Committee has a long history of recommending lower appropriations than the Town Manager and the tax conscious citizens frequently vote for the Committee’s recommendations.
For three years, the Budget Committee has cut funding for software upgrades (Office 365 & Power BI service) along with salary increases and training for staff. Turnover in town staffing has been high as quality employees find better opportunities in other towns.
Municipal staff turnovers in this time period = Town Manager (1x), Director of Public Works (1x), Town Planner (3x), Town Assessor (1x), and Finance Director (3x). As a result, the 2019 Energy Commission goal of transferring responsibility for an Energy Model/Dashboard to town staff is unattainable at this time.
New Leadership. New Approach.
The Eliot Energy Model is going to remain my ‘pet’ project and the new Town Manager is enthusiastic about having access to an Energy Dashboard similar to the one he had when he was the Mayor of Holyoke, MA.
We met and discussed the following use-cases, dashboards and reports:
My MacBook struggles as a virtual Windows machine in Power BI desktop. The electrical meter dataset is large and needs significant data cleaning and transformations before modeling. So I am building a Windows machine to perform this work and plan to do the cleaning and transformations in R before loading the data into Power BI.