Engage the community
Congratulations! You’re a pioneer. Despite the attention to climate change, the examples of effective display of energy use are few and far between. This is the stuff of academic projects and TED talks, not day to day government work.
Find your data.
Unless you have a municipal power utility, you don’t have these data. Your local utility, which has invested substantial resources in mechanisms for measuring energy for billing purposes has it. Accessing it for public purposes presents significant privacy issues. The US Department of Energy has issued a white paper discussion these issues.
Decide how to format your data
A data standard for energy usage data was developed by the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) at the request of the SGIP and the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and will allow utilities and customers to exchange detailed information about electricity usage in a consistent format. Developed through NAESB’s American National Standards Institute-accredited process, the model is a ratified NAESB standard and will be included in NAESB’s filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission next month. The standard can be found at www.naesb.org
Decide how to deliver your data
As pioneers, you should be prepared for exploration, a process of designing, delivering and iterating, assessing the usefulness of each attempt.
The current state of the art (June 2013) is the UCLA interactive map of electricity utilization in Los Angeles.