Benchmarking Energy & Water Use in New York City

The City of New York requires all large buildings to publicly disclose their annual energy consumption. As a graduate research assistant in the lab of Dr. Constantine Kontokosta I worked with this energy disclosure data in a number of projects.

NYC Energy & Water Performance Map

The NYC Energy & Water Performance Map helps to understand the energy and water efficiency of more than 26,000 buildings across New York’s five boroughs. This tool started as a final project with classmates from my Data Visualization class in Spring 2015. After the DataVis class was over, we worked with the NYC Mayor’s Office of Sustainability (MOS) to deploy the site publicly as the official energy and water benchmarking website of MOS.

Predicting Energy Use Across NYC

My capstone project was to use energy disclosure data for large buildings to train predictive models of energy use. These models were then used to predict the annual energy use of all of the more than a million properties in New York City, most of which do not disclose their energy use. This work has been used to gain insight into spatial patterns of energy use across the city, as well as to learn more about the determinants of energy use in large buildings which of these determinants are common across small and large properties.

This work resulted in two publications, including a best paper award at the 2015 Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange, and a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Applied Energy.