Energy analytics

4 July 2016 Cassandra John Data, Energy, Ideas One comment

In fall 2015, I completed an advanced diploma course at NYU for Energy Finance. One of my favorite classes was the fundamentals of energy analytics:

Understanding the overall energy market in the US,
Deep analysis of electricity – how it gets “made” (nuclear, anyone?), how it is used and where, how it is priced, and how it is managed
Individual analysis of various building electricity usage
How to approach the energy efficiency problem

I intend to post a few more snippets from my overall coursework, including the work I had to do on energy company credit analysis and sovereign risk credit analysis, but here’s my favorite set of visuals I generated for my energy analytics class:

Hourly Heat Map
Examining the electricity usage throughout a 24-hour period for over an annual period can give you some incite into what type of building you have on your hands. You also, very easily, can see when daylight savings happens! because it’s that ripple between March into November when everything takes a step to the left!

Blended CDD / HDD
This is my pride and joy! The two charts below, the individual Daily CDD (cooling degree days) and Daily HDD (heating degree days) are what you most typically find, to see how many days where energy was used to heat or to cool a facility. These coincide with the temperature.

However, I wanted to see all of that information in our chart. So, I updated the underlying data to flip HDD into the negative range, and then used Tableau to re-generate a blended chart so that you could easily see the “cool” in the middle (during the summer A/C time!), see the straddle season between summer and winter, and then see the depth of winter and amount of heating required.