The City of Boston recently hosted the Analyze Boston Open Data Challenge to celebrate the launch of its new open data portal. TCB Analytics competed in the event in the “Reducing Boston’s Carbon Footprint” Track. We leveraged a rapid prototyping and development technique and ultimately produced a Shiny dashboard that enabled scenario planning as well as 3D visualization of solar potential across the city.
The team consisted of several data scientists and front-end developers. We used data from the Building Energy and Reporting Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO), Google’s Project Sunroof , and the Boston Planning and Development Agency in order to develop a Shiny dashboard that compares the potential solar yield on a Boston building to its energy performance as measured by BERDO. This enables quick identification of buildings in Boston that have high solar potential and how much energy they can offset with panel installations.
We used R to gather, structure and analyze the data as well as Mapbox GL JS, OpenStreetMap and Shiny by RStudio. This work is a great example of using Shiny in addition to custom javascript on the front-end to build beautiful and interactive dashboards.
You can view the application by clicking the image:
Read more about this project at Greenovate Boston.
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