A digital Water-Energy Atlas

Goal: Develop an interactive GIS visualization tool that integrates customer data from two Southern California utilities, the U.S. Census Bureau, and housing data to display interrelated water and energy use and demographic characteristics for U.S. Census block groups.

Urban water and energy use are closely linked. Water policies impact energy consumption and vice versa. However, because they are typically managed by separate utilities, their interrelationships are not well understood or documented. For effective data sharing between utilities, coupled water and energy data must be presented in a clean and intuitive way that also incorporates an urban environment’s socio-demographic context and possibly the information related to building characteristics. 

A water, energy and demography digital atlas can accomplish this goal by visualizing these interlinks and giving urban planners a way to quickly identify urban communities or hotspots that should be targeted by conservation and efficiency measures. Giving urban planners a simple and intuitive way to assess the cross-sectoral impacts of various water and energy policies also fosters coordinated water and energy use management. 

Some tools that might be useful for this project include:
- R or Python’s pandas library
- R’s ggplot2 package 
- QGIS, ArcGIS, or other spatial tools (i.e. Spatial R, Leaflet, etc.)
- The SimplyAnalytics service freely available to all Stanford students