Save Your Muni: Accessing Sustainability Data

This is an example of an automatically-generated graph of data from Andover Township, NJ.

Inspiration

In my work for Sustainable Jersey, I frequently present data to municipalities (which include towns, cities, boroughs, etc.) to understand where they could improve in their sustainability efforts. The municipalities often struggle to access the data for themselves and rely on us to present it to them, even though all the data is publicly accessible.

What it does

My project allows municipalities to simply select the data they'd like to see for their jurisdiction. It includes much of the relevant data included in the Sustainable Jersey data center. In this project, you can access graphs and tables from 13 different topics for every municipality in New Jersey. These include graphs on electric vehicle usage, solar panel project coverage, and household heating fuels. Municipalities, public officials, and citizens can utilize this data to understand their best paths to improve sustainability and reduce emissions.

How we built it

I built this by utilizing a dataset I created (consoldata.csv), which is simply a consolidated dataset of all the data from the Sustainable Jersey Data Center. The dataset includes data from various topics, such as electricity consumption, miles traveled by vehicle, and greenhouse gas emissions.

I created consoldata.csv by joining all the smaller csv files together in R into one csv file. These smaller files are:

commdata.csv / Community Profile Data

electric.csv / Electric Data

gas.csv / Natural Gas Data

ghg.csv / Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data

vmt.csv / Vehicle Miles Traveled Data

evs.csv / Electric Vehicle Data

solar.csv / Solar Installations Data

lifetimeres.csv / Residential Energy Efficiency Participation Rate Data

lifetimecomm.csv / Commercial Energy Efficiency Participation Rate Data

The R file is consoldata.R

All of the data are available at: Data Center

Then, using Python, I allow users to select the municipality and data they would like to view.

The Python file is sjconsol.ipynb

Challenges we ran into

This was my third time ever using Python, so I had to build on my very limited experience to create a project without bugs or errors. The most common challenges were with the data themselves. Since I was using excel, R, and Python, transferring the files between the programs often created unsavory changes that I had to manually fix.