Power BI for the Energy Sector: Power BI and Data Analytics for Enviro’s (Mar 2021)
The "Power BI and Data Analytics for Enviros" meetup group is all about sharing tips, tricks and hacks for analysing, visualising and communicating environmental data. The purpose of this blog is to summarise the key take-aways from each of the presenters, to help with sharing knowledge, empowering others and creating a strong data culture within our community.
🎦 Check out the full event recording here 🎦
In March, we had Muen Chen (SA Power Networks) explaining the Power BI dashboard he created to help maintain powerline assets and also saving bird nests. That’s right, often birds create nests at the top of Stobie pole powerlines, which creates a potential fire hazard, and Muen’s dashboard helped to identify when and where nests are found. We also had Pat Booth from MeCee Solutions present on the Marginal Cost Curve (MCC) custom Power BI visual which is being developed, and how this visual can be used to show some powerful insights into your energy and financial data!
You can watch the entire recording in the video above, or skip ahead to the sections that interest you by clicking on the individual videos below. The blog is connected to our Meetup group and YouTube channel recording, so we would LOVE to have you subscribe to these and become part of our growing community 😊.
Group Intro & A Fun Quiz…
Christian & Alice (DiscoverEI)
▶️ We introduced the group and ran a fun little quiz for a great prize: the RADACAD academy one-month subscription ▶️
Reza Rad and Leila Etaati from RADACAD generously provided a one-month subscription to the RADACAD academy online learning library, which is a fantastic resource to learn about Power BI, custom visual development, SQL and so much more. Congratulations to Krimali Solanki, for winning this months’ prize, by sharing why her favourite new feature is the upgrades to the color picker!.
DiscoverEI’s own Daniel Marsh-Patrick also has an excellent course on the RADACAD Academy all about “How to Build Custom Visuals” which we highly recommend for anyone interested! The RADACAD team are also running the Power BI Summit online conference in April 2021, so make sure to register to hear from some of the best global speakers talk about Power BI.
Bird Nests and Stobie Poles
Muen Chen (SA Power Networks)
▶️ Skip ahead to Muen’s session ▶️
Muen Chen from the SA Power Networks in Adelaide, shared some of his work in maintaining powerline assets, where workers sometimes come across bird nests built on top of Stobie poles. The nests could present risks for starting a fire, so need to be removed. There are standard procedures in place for workers to identify the bird species and contact Fauna Rescue when needed. Before bushfire season each year, we make sure that we have appropriately managed issues such as bird nests, so Muen share his Power BI dashboard that shows when and where the nests are found, as well as an embedded HTML webpage (using the awesome HTML Content custom visual) that shows all our asset inspectors’ relevant photographs (as shown in the photos below).
AND DON’T FORGET TO SEE THE VERY COOL ROBOT AT THE START - FOLLOW SA POWER NETWORKS ROBOT (AKA SPOT) DEVELOPMENT HERE
The MCC Power BI Custom Visual
Pat Booth (MeCee Solutions)
▶️ Skip ahead in the video to listen to Pat’s session and learn about the MCC visual ▶️
Pat Booth from MeCee Solutions presented the Marginal Cost Curve (aka the MCC). This is a Power BI custom visual currently being developed, which can be applied across the energy and resources sectors to estimate the volume and costs of opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and much more. The visual was presented alongside other supporting information in this renewable energy themed Power BI report.
Pat gave a great rundown and explanation of how the visual can be used in the energy sector, but also expanded to other sectors! If you want to find out more about the MCC or use the visual on your own Power BI reports, then take a look HERE for more details and to have a play-around with it in an existing Power BI report!!
We’re taking a break in April, but will return in May 2021 for some awesome sessions in the back half of the year. We have teed up some pretty cool sounding sessions including:
Power BI for business users (real-world experiences getting started with the tool)
Combining IoT with Dashboards (truly better together!)
Visualising your environmental flows
Forecasting for the future - A water balance assessment
Visualising the Solar panel set-up at Home
Thanks for dialling in and we are looking forward to many more sessions focused on visualising data for our environment!
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