Gainesville Green made it on to the OpenEI.org blog!

This latest update is mostly bugfixes and backend improvements, in preparation for a sister site we’ll be bringing online Real Soon Now.  The new site will focus on renters, and helping choose more efficient apartments.

There are two notable features in this release:

New data!  We’ve got another dump from our friends at Gainesville Regional Utilities (who were recently named Best of U.S. Public Power Utilities), and just finished getting it into the system this morning.

There is also a new checkbox on the map screen for “show energy intensity per 1000 square feet”, which changes how the map pins are colored:

By default, we color pins based on raw consumption; so a big house that consumes 1000kwh will be redder than a small house consuming 900kwh.  Energy intensity is measured per thousand square feet, and smooths out the difference between home sizes.  This really makes a difference when looking at neighborhoods with drastically different home sizes, and gives some clues about how behavior and technology can affect consumption.  Here’s a neighborhood with a lot of bigger homes at the south end.  Here’s the raw consumption:

And here’s the energy-intensity consumption:

When we see consumption per square foot, some of those big homes are doing better then the smaller houses at the top.  This only goes so far; notice the most consumptive home is the same in both cases.

We are so excited!  Today the DOE Office of Science announced the winners of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants, and we made it!  We spent a lot of time (55 hours according to our ticket system) on the proposal, and it was totally worth it.  The DOE ended up accepting around 17% of proposals.

The reviewers at the DOE gave some really great feedback, here are some of our favorites:

Local governments, trade organizations, and environmental groups ought to be interested in further funding of this idea.

I was impressed with the no-nonsense approach of the project.  The effort is to develop good quality statistical measures and present the user with an even better light weight (easy to use) analytical front end.  While it is indeed a populist tool the focus is solely on energy conservation. By providing powerful behind the scenes metrics, incorporating multiple visualizations, increased depth of exploration for power users, gaming concepts to encourage involvement, social media interoperability, and other tools, this tool really works to make saving energy fun.

This project has an excellent potential to have a strong impact in terms of technical and economic benefits.

Great idea and well proposed.

There was also some valuable criticism:

Think about consumer privacy issues and any implied liability to utility company in how data is used.

Only concern for this proposal is the accessibility of any data from the utilities and the preservation of privacy.

…visualizations are simplistic, comparison and ranking algorithms do not appear to be much more than simple linear equations.

Since submitting the proposal, we’ve implemented an opt-out system to help address privacy concerns, added more visualization options, and have a statistical model in the wings to improve our ranking algorithms.

There’s a ton of paperwork to be done, and we’ll be working with the DOE more in the coming weeks to hash out details.  This grant is a multi-phase grant, and so we’re now eligible for even more funding in 2011 for a phase 2, and even more in 2012 for a phase 3.

We have a press release available at the parent site with links to the official documentation: Accelerated Data Works Awarded DOE Grant.

As a nice side note, there were two other local groups who got SBIR or STTR grants, Sinmat Inc, and UltraHiNet LLC.  UltraHiNet seems to be a research company run by UF professor Sartaj Sahni, who, coincidentally, instructed most of our programming staff in undergrad or grad school.

The latest update is all about making the map easier to use.  In the past, we had links from a home to a map showing a particular configuration of year, usage type (electricity, natural gas, etc), and comparison group, but once you were on a map there was no easy way to explore further.   A few of you figured out how to adjust some parameters in the URL to see different things, and the April update adds a nice user interface to adjust these on the fly:

Here’s a close up of just the map controls pane:

• the buttons let you choose which kind of consumption to view
• the slider bars let you select what date range to view
• the dropdown has a few options for what set of homes to show on the map
• the “Link to this map” will popup a window with a URL you can copy/paste to share the current map

This update was a long time in the making, and brings a new level of interactivity to the map.   There are also some nifty animations to let you know when we’re loading up new data.

We’ll be refining it over the next few weeks and then will be bringing similar interaction to the home report page, allowing longer ranges for the graphs.