Introductions

Authors:Sierra Milosh, Stephen Bunn, Nathan Davis, James Ward

Who We Are

We are two senior and two graduate level students at Appalachian State University under the SSTEM NSF funded scholarship. Each semester, we get to choose a research project to work on with other students from the SSTEM program. This semester, we chose to help create a dashboard for a student-run, student-funded group on campus called the Renewable Energy Initiaitve.

Why We’re Doing This Project

The Renewable Energy Initiative at Appalachian State University gets a $5, self-imposed fee from each student per semester to put towards renewable energy systems on campus. Recently, the REI passed a referendum that required each new project proposal include in the plan and budget a data monitoring system. Over the past few years, the REI has been putting a lot more time, effort, and money into monitoring all of the renewable energy systems on campus, including PV (photovoltaic or solar) systems, solar thermal systems, and a wind turbine (previously the largest turbine in North Carolina, to boot). We want to be able to track data on each system for several reasons:

  1. So that we can see when a system isn’t running properly and begin to address the problem. The monitoring systems track anywhere between 10 and 50 points of data per device, so the ability to see both live and historical data allows for a more comprehensive analysis of what might be going wrong within the system.
  2. So that we can use the data to tell a story to people. We want our students to be involved with sustainability on campus, so using real numbers to tell a story about our renewable energy systems on campus (that their student funds have paid for) is on the top of our priority list. We would like to be able to talk about how much energy each system is producing, and how that energy production ranks among the other renewable energy systems on campus.
  3. So that we have easily accessible data to be used for reports. Appalachian’s commitment to sustainability is ranked among hundreds of other universities in the country through massive reports like the STARS report and the Greenhouse Gas Inventory. We would like to be able to go in and easily access data to fill in these comprehensive reports.

But primarily, the goal of the REI is to get students involved with renewable energy that they are funding on campus. We want to have clean, historical, and live data to bring it down a level and talk to students about what is happening on their campus.

Currently, the Renewable Energy Initiative is pouring in $10,000 from our $150,000 budget to (unnamed company) to create a dashboard that displays the data from our systems on campus in understandable graphs. The REI is unsatisfied with the current company, as:

  • Data is not technically live (it uploads via FTP every 15 minutes).
  • The graphs are not very customizable – The user cannot go in and add whichever features they please to any graph – They instead have to set up a call with (unnamed company) to try to get those features added, and (unnamed company) does not always know how to add the desired features.
  • The REI has to create virtual meters because the (unnamed company) does not support certain devices – The REI had to consolidate all of the information into one big table with all of the desired devices and units.