Analyzing Data in Excel!
Author: Oscar Morton | Major: Biological and Agricultural Engineering | Semester: Spring 2023
For my honors project, I analyzed energy consumption data from a public school district in Northwest Arkansas that wishes to remain unnamed. The data I analyzed covered a period before and after some of the school buildings implemented energy efficiency upgrades and practices, so I looked at how effective these upgrades were and determined if there were any cyclical trends in energy consumption for each building.
Through this analysis, I can provide insight to the schools on how effective (if at all) these energy efficiency upgrades were, and which buildings reduced their energy consumption the most. This also allowed me to calculate greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions based on these upgrades. Overall, I found that 8 of the 11 buildings reduced their energy consumption during my analysis period. Of these 8 buildings, there was an average reduction in GHG emissions of 0.58% per month, which adds up to a large reduction over the 5-year period I analyzed.
I chose this topic because energy and greenhouse gas emissions are things I’ve always been interested in, but I didn’t get to go very in-depth in these areas through my coursework in my department. So, this project allowed me to really focus on this area and explore it for myself. I have known my mentor Dr. Haggard, for many years, so he was an obvious choice in my mind to mentor me through this project. Even though energy efficiency is not his normal area of expertise, he is always willing to take on projects that are atypical for him. Because of this, we were also able to show that methods of statistical analysis common in other areas (in Dr. Haggard’s case, water quality) are applicable for analyzing energy data.
The school district whose data I analyzed wished to remain anonymous for this project, meaning I had no direct communication with them. This was the biggest obstacle for me to overcome for this project. Because I had no direct communication with them, I had to analyze the data as a completely separate third party. This means that I did not know which buildings implemented upgrades, what kinds of upgrades were implemented (were there physical upgrades, such as switching to LEDs, or where there best management practices implemented, like making sure to turn lights off, or a combination?) or when upgrades were implemented. So, I had to just look at all the data available to me and see if there were any trends or if energy use was actually changing. This means that I could only speculate on what was actually happening instead of making specific recommendations to individual school buildings. If I had more access, I would have liked to look at each specific upgrade that was implemented across the district and do an in-depth analysis of a single building to see what I could find.
After this, I will be graduating this spring, and will begin working full-time at Halff Associates, an engineering firm in Bentonville, AR. I will be taking the summer off, however, so I will be travelling and enjoying myself to the fullest extent possible before beginning work in August.