End of spring semester

This is my final blog post for this semester. Made some good progress: literature review completed, research portfolio approved, clearer focus on electricity conservation, a sketch of an experimental design for Saunders Hall, and interesting possible directions with REIS. I’m planning to develop my proposal during the summer and hopefully defend before the fall semester begins.

I started work on creating a graph of renewable energy production in Hawaii based on the figures from DBEDT. The idea is to produce a chart that can be updated monthly showing how the state (and Oahu) are doing compared to the renewable energy portfolio standards, and more recent renewable production targets. Unfortunately, there isn’t a single spreadsheet cell that captures renewable energy: there is one for wind and hydro, but that doesn’t account for solar or geothermal energy. It looks like energy purchased by the utility from other providers (like the geothermal on the Big Island) is lumped together. I was hoping it would be trivial to produce such a chart, but it looks like it will require some additional work.

Planned items from last week:

• Get Plone set up for REIS website
  • done
• Finish revisions on 09-12
  • done
• Send 09-12 to Dave Nixon
  • done
• Make graph of Hawaii state energy usage
  • made some progress

Other accomplishments this week:

• Set up Plone for REIS website
• Set up Google Calendar for REIS, and put embedded version in REIS website
• Attended REIS student information meeting

Hours worked: 30 (target: 30 hr)

Pointers to work products:

• Final draft of tech report for  Saunders interventions

Cool links:

• Stack Overflow, an interesting site for programmers to ask questions to other programmers. Has wiki, forum, and social news (voting) aspects.

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