Questions to Ask & Selection of Relevant Datasets

This week Team AIREC brainstormed questions that we would like to answer with big data. During this process we carefully selected several datasets on energy usage and weather to help answer these questions.

With these datasets we will be answering the following questions:

Power Consumption:

How much power does a particular community use during a particular period, i.e. hour, day, month, year?

How many mega-watts are required from renewable energy sources to support the above communities energy needs?

At what hours, days, & months, on average, is energy consumption the highest? (What periods cause the most strain on the infrastructure.)

More to come..

Costs:

What government incentivies are available to a particular community for replacing fossil fuel energy sources with renewable energy ones?

How much revenue does a utilty service that provides power for an area make in one year? How much does a renewable energy source cost to purchase and install?

What is the LCOE of the renewable generating technologies? (Levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is often cited as a convenient summary measure of the overall competiveness of different generating technologies. It represents the per-kilowatthour cost (in real dollars) of building and operating a generating plant over an assumed financial life and duty cycle.)

More to come..

Wind Power Generation and Installation Insights:

What land is available in the area, that is for sale, that can support a wind energy installation?

At these locations, what have the trends in wind speed & direction been for the past 10 years, during what part of the year is the wind speed at its highest or lowest speeds?

Are the trends indicative of a sound place to install a wind turbine facility?

How many wind turbines can be placed on the property - and - how much in USD will the purchase of the land, turbines, and intallation cost?

Is there a difference in cost, overall, between equipment providers?

Solar

What land is available in the area, that is for sale, that can support a solar energy installation?

At these locations, what have the trends in sunlight, temperature, and precipitation been for the past 10 years, during what part of the year are these factors at their highest or lowest measures?

Are the trends indicative of a sound place to install a solar energy facility?

Pollution:

How much pollution is a fossil fuel powerplant creating, in greenhouse gas per year?

How much pollution will be reduced (in tons of greenhouse gas) as a result of replacing these powerplants with renewable energy sources?

Over the lifetime that the renewable energy source is expected to be in service, how much greenhouse gas has the source prevented from being generated?

On a global scale, if all communities were to be coverted to renewable sources, as outlined in this project, what would the effect on climate change be?

For today we have retrieved the following datasets and reports:

[DATA] Quality Controlled Local Climatological Data

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/qclcd/QCLCD?prior=N

[DATA] Electric power sales, revenue, and energy efficiency Form EIA-861 detailed data files

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/index.html

[REPORT] Levelized Cost and Levelized Avoided Cost of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy Outlook 2015

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

Many, many, more datasets to come!

By the next post we will have:

- Selected more datasets that will help answer our questions.

- Clean the datasets and begin the process of uploading the data to the HDFS.