Dashboard Week 4 – My Solar Power System

The Challenge

We are almost there! The day 4 challenge is quite interesting. We got a bunch of datasets for solar systems, which varies from individual systems to power stations. The requirements are challenging because we need to add external data to our chosen datasets and blend the data together only using the Tableau product suite. So my best friend Alteryx is out.

 

The Data

I focused on the individual system and used small scale installations as a reference dataset, then I download three climate datasets from the Bureau of Meteorology as external data.

Then I decided to only use Tableau Desktop to do all the data cleansing and blending. Long story short, with lots of trial and error, I nailed it. One tip for you, be careful with the Relationship Calculation, it affect the performance a lot.

 

The Story

This time I build the story in the first-person narrative. I named my story/viz My Solar Power System. I started by asking questions, like what’s my system efficiency along time? How’s the weather affect it? How about comparing it with my neighbourhood? What is the return period after I installed a new solar system? With these questions in mind, I tried a lot of charts and only kept the most simple and efficient ones.

Because of the dashboard size, I can only present a part of my viz here.

The final viz can be found here.

 

What went well

• Managed to find weather data without using API
• Managed to do data preparation all in Tableau Desktop
• Add some design into the viz

 

What could be better

• Timeboxing. Whenever there are new challenges that I haven’t met before, it’s hard to manage the time