Princeton Energy

Welcome to the Princeton Energy Repository

Goals

Using data from PSEG, EIA, EPA, NJ Clean Energy Program and other agencies, develop technology and visualizations that will analyze and display Princeton’s greenhouse gas emissions over time. Create simple quantitative comparisons that will help residents, businesses and other community members understand the impact their efforts to reduce energy consumption can have on Princeton’s greenhouse gas emissions as a whole.

Dataset Information

Data from 2009 for Gas and Electric usage in Princeton Township and Boro, categorized by Industrial, Commercial, and Residential.

Industrial category is not "true" industrial and can be considered Commercial
Classification of Industrial is based on SIC code
Includes Princeton University property in the Commercial category
kWh & Therms are billing information and not actual usage. In the vast majority of cases they are one and the same but they will be instances either because of an estimated bill or a corrected bill where they can be different. This explains negative values in kWh & Therms.
PSEG can provide data in excel on a Quarterly basis
No limitations on use of data as it is in aggregate
Meter to resident or commercial is roughly 1:1
Data needs to be weather normalized using heating and cooling degree data for the area
Princeton Hospital closed and moved to Plainsboro on May 23rd 2012 so likely explains drop in Borough Commercial usage
Princeton Township and Borough consolidated into the Princeton Municipality on January 1st, 2013 but PSEG still records usage separately
PSEG maintains some streetlights in Princeton but not all. It needs to be determined if the streetlight data is only PSEG owned & maintained. The remaining streetlights are owned and maintained by the Municipality and included in their bill

Ideas for Data Usage

Weather normalize data to determine if usage is increasing or decreasing on factors other than weather http://academic.udayton.edu/kissock/http/Weather/
Determine the Greenhouse Gas emissions resulting from the usage data using PSEG energy source data or other proxy
Create a tool that will show how energy efficiency or conservation measures in Princeton could impact the overall consumption in terms of easier to understand equivalencies http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/calculator.html

Additional resources:

EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration) state energy consumption data
EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator
Weather Depot http://www.weatherdatadepot.com/ for getting HDD {Heating Degree Days} and CDD (Cooling Degree Days)

Usage Notes

Download or fork here to start contributing
If there are any comments, issues, or suggestions please open an Issue through the tab on the right

Cleaned Dataset

An attempt to clean the Energy dataset is underway and the first draft is available under cleanDataset in .xls format. Please make no lossy modifications, add computed columns.

Original Dataset

The original dataset is located under originalDataset

Ruby on Rails Commands

You will need to use these commands to run the Application in Ruby on Rails...

Move in to the 'greengraph' directory

cd greengraph

Migrate the Development Database (Make it current)

rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=development

Seed the newly migrated database (from the input CSV files)

rake db:seed

Start the Rails Server - this is accessible on http://localhost:3000, if you have used the Rails default settings

rails s

smchow/greengraph