Philadelphia Municipal Building Energy Benchmarking

The Philadelphia Department of Energy has data available on opendataphilly.org (link below) showing energy consumption for Philadelphia Municipal Buildings between 2011-13. They are looking to add 2014 in the near future. They have asked us to help analyze and present the data so that the information is palatable for Philadelphians interested in creating energy efficient buildings. The Department of Energy has invested money in projects to help make some of our older municipal buildings become more energy efficient. They'd like to help voters understand the impact of their tax dollars on creating energy efficient buildings in our city. Informing citizens of these energy improvements could help the Department of Energy with passing future legislation to support funding for energy efficient building projects in Philadelphia.

The goal of this project is to present this municipal building data and display it online with charts, tables, and potentially an energy consumption graphic over time. We'd also like to set this up so that once the project is complete, the Department of Energy will be able to load files with future energy data into an interface that will automatically update all charts, tables, displays, etc. For now, we look to use python to analyze the data as a step towards displaying what we need on the web.

To contribute on our github page, click the Developer's Link to the right. The slack channel is linked to the User's URL. You'll need to ask Ben or Dawn to invite you to the Code for Philly slack channel before you can join. The channel for this project within the Code for Philly slack is #energy_benchmarking

The information below is an email we received from the Department of Energy with some general details on the project:

o Make municipal energy consumption data interesting for people to look at

o We talked about simplifying the data for public use which falls under this goal

· Provide some sort of time element to the data so that people can easily see trends

· Highlight energy-efficient buildings, maybe show a comparison between top performers and low performers

o This could be a place to mention energy efficiency projects, or other reasons why a building is a top performer

Here’s the data we have right now: · Currently public benchmarking data: https://www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/building-energy-benchmarking

· Benchmarking data visualization tool: http://visualization.phillybuildingbenchmarking.com/#/map

Our inventory of data that we’re soliciting feedback on to see what else we should make public (feel free to add comments!): http://www.phila.gov/data/inventory/#inventory/?view_42_filters=[%7B%22field%22%3A%22field_216%22%2C%22operator%22%3A%22is%22%2C%22value%22%3A%2255cdf2756c2aa0dd678e61bd%22%7D]&view_42_page=1