Energy Dashboard

Overview

The Borough of State College governs State College and its environs, and provides many essential services to the community. The Borough maintains a fleet of dump trucks to maintain the roads in the area, and the engines of these trucks must be heated using electricity during the winter months to ensure reliable starting. The Borough asked for an energy dashboard to be installed to ensure the efficient and reliable operation of its engine block heaters.

Objectives

Our objective was to implement an energy dashboard to monitor energy use and failures in the cold storage building maintained by the Borough of State College, and create an educational children’s program related to the Borough’s energy use.

Approach

– Inspect the cold storage facility

– Catalog existing electrical hardware to ensure system compatibility

– Research numerous hardware options for logging data

– Research common features of dashboard software

– Pivot upon determining that no hardware is available within budget, to providing a virtual dashboard

– The COVID-19 pandemic further reinforced the pivot to a virtual dashboard

– Create dashboards in Microsoft Excel and educational content in Java

Outcomes

– A virtual dashboard was furnished, providing the functionality of the software side of an energy dashboard

– If the Borough decides to expand their budget for a dashboard the plans are in place to add the hardware needed to provide live data to the dashboard.