OpenPV
The OpenPV Project is an effort by The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in Golden, CO to collect and present data on solar-power installations across the country.
I was browsing the site today when I came across their OpenPV Visualization flex app, an interesting way of browsing solar power installations. It collects the data the OpenPV project has compiled and lays it out in a google-map-plus-flex-dashboard mashup.
The app uses Flex Charting to good effect…I was never really big on the animated transitions offered by the graphs, but this application shows that they can be used to add visual interest without taking away from the basic task of reading some numbers to figure out what’s going on. Clicking from one zip code to another gives just enough animation to show you’ve changed data sets.
It’s great to see a these kinds of well-defined, well-designed repositories of open information in the alternative energy industry. I wonder if anybody is doing something similar for Green Buildings and the data they produce?
I often say that it’s a shame that the green building architecture and engineering industries don’t benefit from the open source mindset that’s improved the lives of so many computer programmers. Is it crazy to think that the kind of success and impact that Ruby on Rails has had could have an analog in the green building world? What would a 37Signals building look like — both in construction and in the final product?
Perhaps projects like OpenPV are the initial stalls in the newly forming bazaar around the architecture cathedral.