Energy, Sustainability, and Graphing

Personalized PG&E usage data is readily available for customers, but what can this data tell us? At Stanford, the Flora Lab is developing a curriculum called “Design Your Energy Lifestyle” to push young people to make better, data-informed energy usage decisions for themselves and their families. The goal of this ETP activity, “Energy, Sustainability, and Graphing,” is to extend the work of Dr. Flora’s lab to allow students to use calculus skills, namely the derivative, to gain a deeper understanding of their own energy usage. Students will take their families’ PG&E data, create graphical representations of their energy usage and costs over different periods of time (through the data visualization software Tableau), and analyze these self-created graphs to better understand energy usage patterns. Students will also reflect on and make decisions that might change how they use energy to save on electricity costs and reduce energy consumption.