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.

I was looking at houses on Zillow this weekend and wanted to get a rough idea of their energy efficiency. I was copying a lot of addresses into our search page which worked fine just took a while.

So instead I made the Zillow->GG bookmarklet. When viewing a home-detail page on Zillow it makes the address be a link over to Gainesville Green’s page on that home.

To use:

1. Drag the bookmark onto your bookmarks toolbar, or right click and select “Add to Favorites” in Internet Explorer or “Bookmark this Link” in Firefox
2. When viewing a home detail page on Zillow click the bookmarklet.
3. The home address at the top of the page is now a link to the Gainesville Green search page. Click the link to go see it there.

That’s all!

We’ve just published another revision of the website, with some exciting new stuff.

Speed

We’ve done a performance run through the system, so everything will load faster than ever.  We were able to simplify a few major components, and completely eliminate a few of our worst bottlenecks.  Some pages doing large comparisons have sped up by several orders of magnitude.

More line chart options

When viewing a home report, you can now click on the legend for a line and toggle it on and off.  This can make things a little clearer.

Clicking the legend for “VALWOOD Average” will hide that line from the graph:

Clicking it again will turn that line back on.  This doesn’t make that much sense on a simple water graph, but this allows us to work with many more lines on the same graph.

Direct Group Comparisons

When you’re logged in and looking at one of your groups, we now show a graph directly comparing consumption for the homes in that group.  This lets you go head-to-head with your friends:

Log in, make a group, and check it out!

Recently we’ve been working on more ways to display data, and this one so neat I wanted to share a screenshot:

Very fun stuff to work on, we hope to have this up and interactive on the live site in the next month or so.  A very technical post about how these are drawn is available on the developer’s blog: simplistic heat-maps using Vecto.

Grant D. Jacobsen of UC Santa Barbara and  Matthew J. Kotchen of Yale University and NBER prepared a draft – Are Building Codes Effective at Saving Energy? Evidence From Residential Billing Data in Florida – for discussion at the Conference on Green Building, the Economy, and Public Policy to be held at University of California, Berkeley on December 2-3, 2009. The data for the study was obtained from Gainesville-Green.com.

A team of researchers from schools across the country recently published a great paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): Household actions can provide a behavioral wedge to rapidly reduce U.S. carbon emissions

From the article (emphasis added):

We use a behavioral approach to examine the reasonably achievable potential for near-term reductions by altered adoption and use of available technologies in U.S. homes and nonbusiness travel. We estimate the plasticity of 17 household action types in 5 behaviorally distinct categories by use of data on the most effective documented interventions that do not involve new regulatory measures. These interventions vary by type of action and typically combine several policy tools and strong social marketing. National implementation could save an estimated 123 million metric tons of carbon per year in year 10, which is 20% of household direct emissions or 7.4% of U.S. national emissions, with little or no reduction in household well-being. The potential of household action deserves increased policy attention. Future analyses of this potential should incorporate behavioral as well as economic and engineering elements.

In the paper they do the math to combine estimated reductions from non-lifestyle impacting household changes with estimated adoption rates.  This adds some behavioral aspects to existing models that are based solely on engineering or economic factors, giving a more accurate picture.

They also make an interesting point about the “Cash for Clunkers” program (CARS):

It is too soon to estimate the effects in terms of emissions reduction, but 2 observations are worth making. First, the programs are quite different in behavioral terms.  Although there are questions about the cost effectiveness of CARS, it was a great behavioral success, probably due in part to outstanding marketing, paid for by the  industry, and convenience (it featured one-stop shopping, removed all paperwork burdens from the consumer, and provided an instant rebate). This contrasts, for instance, with the tax credit program, which also provides a large financial incentive but has not been as well marketed, does not make shopping easy, and requires  paperwork and up to a 1-year delay in collecting the credits. More could have been done to apply the lessons of past behavioral research. Second, they do not include an evaluation component that would allow for learning from these major policy experiments.

The entire 5 page paper is available from PNAS in PDF, I highly recommend it.

This month’s update is all about bug fixes and minor UI tweaks:

• New GRU data!  We’ve now got consumption data up to August/September 2009!
• Carbon footprint has been calculated for our new GRU data
• Lots of bug fixes for corner cases discovered with more data
• We added a “this site is under development” banner on the front to better set expectations for users.  Our very visible “beta” logo got lost when the template was redesigned
• On the home report page, changing comparison criteria (year or peer group) remembers the selected tab, so if you’re looking at water and change year, the page reloads and you’re still looking at water
• The “About” and “Overview” pages have  merged
• This blog has a pretty template
• The map views now default to the “normal” mode, as opposed to satellite.  This speeds up the load time significantly
• The map initially loads a wide view of Gainesville, so it’s not just an ugly gray square while the comparisons are calculated
• We removed the listings of raw data from the home report page, the download link serves that purpose.  This speeds up load times and halves the size (~55KB to ~26KB) of that page
• re-enabled the google ads on the side and bottom
• moved to a shiny new server (as shiny as a virtual server can be)

This was also a busy month from a non-technical perspective.  We had great meetings with a property appraiser, two municipal utilities, and a UF professor. We also attended two conferences, made great progress on some marketing materials, and are getting geared up for more conferences in November.  We’ve also solicited a lot of feedback about what the website looks like, how it works, and where it should go.

Next month we’ll be working on a simpler UI for the home-report, and expanding the actions system to allow before/after comparisons.