FEB 16

A Columbia University study has plotted the energy use of New York City's buildings on a beautiful, interactive map where you can view energy consumption by block. The map really illuminates how different areas of the city, and the types of buildings located in those areas, use energy differently.

In New York, buildings account for two-thirds of the energy used by the city, a major reason that the city has pushed for retrofitting programs. This new map can help city officials know where to concentrate their improvements.

The model uses data from a few sources to arrive at the block by block totals:

• Data the city government gathered from utilities on zip-code level numbers on electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, and steam consumption in 2009,
• Data on how the energy was used (heating and cooling, water heating, lighting, etc.) from the U.S. Energy information Administration
• Information on the building floor areas of each of the city’s tax lots from the city government.

You can visit the fully interactive map here, where you can view the total yearly kWh used per block, total fuel use and total land area. Each block also has its own pie chart with the breakdown of how that energy use was distributed among space heating, space cooling, water heating and general electricity use.

via MIT Tech Review

Comments (1)

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Awesome, but...
written by KMoney, February 17, 2012

I didn't know it had floor information. I didn't see it on the wider zoom, but it is there after zooming in.

I would be better to see colors based on building area, but it is still cool.

I am confused about the units. Why does the electricity use have (10^ next to it? Also I think they are converting therms to kWhs, but there seems to be several orders of magnitude difference between the energy usages. Does that seem correct? Therms used for heating, when converted to kWh seem to be much larger than than power usage. (I live in a warmer climate so I have no idea).

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