The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), through the Local Energy Action Program (LEAP), is in charge of developing energy consumption profiles across cities, towns, municipalities, residential areas, and C&I sectors.
To encourage municipalities to become more interested in LEAP, the Clean Energy Department and Data Services team decided to build, automatize and deploy a Local Energy Action Dashboard with key energy consumption metrics to describe statistics for the residential, commercial and industrial sectors in Massachusetts. The aim of this project was to highlight how energy is been consumed in the State by each town, promote the use of statistics for energy consumption policy making, show the benefits of using historic data to minimize energy consumption, and convince communities to engage with MAPC.
The Local Energy Action Dashboard assesses readily-available datasets for energy costs, consumption and expenditures. This information is classified into three categories: Housing, Commercial and Industrial. The tool generates infographics and statistical metrics to facilitate its usage for policy-makers, government officials and the general public.
The Local Energy Action project has become a baseline for other local energy planning efforts in the State. Users have been able to generate key insights for new methodologies to forecast energy consumption by providing access to significant information on consumption, expenditures and costs associated with energy usage within the State of Massachusetts.