Community Energy Plan maker
Over the last year Glyn Hudson, Bethan Gritten and I have been running a community energy project with our local sustainability group Ecobro in the Penrhyndeudraeth area of North Wales. The aim of the project is to create a comprehensive snapshot of our current energy use as a group that we can then use as a solid foundation for creating a sustainable energy action plan.
As part of the project we have installed 20 openenergymonitor energy monitors and have also developed for the project a community energy auditing and plan making application which is what this blog post is about.
This is how the application works:
1) Fill out a single household energy audit, compare how your energy picture compares to the average UK household energy use and how it relates to the Centre for Alternative Technology Zero Carbon Britain 2030 energy scenario:
2) Aggregate data from each household to create a group view:
3) Explore how group scenario is built up of individual households contribution:
4) Explore future energy scenarios, see the effect of switching to electric cars, heatpumps etc on real household data from your group:
5) In the next version, see effect of energy efficiency measures, insulation, draft-proofing and see the cost and payback details of scenarios including a comparison of different measures by sustainable energy % increase impact per £.
The idea is that through this process we can help bring focus to areas and solutions that can have most impact and also give a tangible reference of progress so that milestones can be celebrated when achieved.
The application is largely inspired by David Mackay's book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air (free to read online) as you can see from the use of the energy stacks. The aim is also very much about creating a tool that helps to create sustainable energy plans that add up and in the spirit of openenergymonitor and David Mackay's book the application is open source.
Download the source from github: https://github.com/openenergymonitor/CommunityEnergyPlanMaker
Try it out:
If you would like to help with development that would be great, please get in contact / send us github pull requests. If your doing a community energy plan making project and would like to use this tool, please do and let us know how your using it.
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