User Tools

Site Tools


vd-pge

Analyzing PG&E data with VisiData

At the PG&E website, you can download a CSV table of your energy usage. Click “Energy Usage Details” and then the “Green Button” at their site to download your data.

PG&E CSVs come with 5 rows of metadata followed by Type, Date, Start Time, End Time, Usage, Units, Cost, Notes columns. Delete the five rows of metadata in a text editor, or use tail to remove them like so (or with tail -n +6 for older tail):

  tail +6 pge_electric_interval_data.csv | vd -f csv -

Then prepare your PG&E data like so:

Set Column Types, Widths, Names, Importance

Key Meaning
- Hide columns TYPE, END TIME, UNITS and NOTES
= Create a new column for weekday. Enter “DATE.weekday()”
= Create a new column for weekday name. Enter “DATE.strftime('%A')”
^ Rename “START TIME” to one word since column names should be one word for Python expressions.
C Go to column mode and…
t Select the DATE and START TIME columns
& Make a new column that merges them
- (Optionally delete some columns' rows from column mode to really delete columns from the sheet.)
q, - Quit the Column mode, hide (sets their width to 0) DATE and START TIME columns
O Go to options mode and…
e Set disp_date_fmt to %Y-%m-%d %H:%M (or do it in column mode's fmtstr for the one column.)
q Quit options mode.
@!, %, $ Set DATE_START_TIME to date format and important, USAGE to float, COST to currency
= Add a column, enter COST/USAGE, (Make it float with %)
^ Rename COST/USAGE to kWh rate
H,V and _ Move and resize the columns.

You should end up with a sheet with usable data. Note that @ means “date format”, # means “integer”, % means “float” and $ means “currency”. Also note that we haven't set aggregator types yet. We'll use those for frequency tables.

View average usage by hour of day

Key Meaning
- Hide all columns, leaving only time, USAGE, and COST
+ On USAGE and COST, set aggregator type to… say, avg for average.
F On the time column, tap F to get a frequency table.
[ The frequency table is sorted on the new aggregations, on time column, use [ to sort by time again.
- Remove the new count column.
C, e, “%H:%M”, q, @! Go to column mode, set time column format to %H:%M, exit column mode, set time to date format.
g. Display a graph with all visible columns.
-, + Zoom in and out of the graph.
q, q Quit the graph, quit the frequency sheet
C, t, ge, 8 Column mode, toggle date_time, DATE, wday_num, wday, edit width to 8, to see these columns again.

View average usage by day of week

Key Meaning
- Hide all columns, leaving only wday_num, time, USAGE, and COST
C, t, & Column mode, toggle wday_num, time, make a new column that joins them.
= With TIME as string format, make a new row as int(int(TIME[:2])/4)*4

Select Rows to Analyze

Directly selecting ranges of rows:

Key Meaning
s,t,u Select/toggle/unselect current row.
, Select all rows matching value of current cell
gs,gt,gu … all rows
zs,zt,zu … from top to cursor
gzs,gzt,gzu … from cursor to bottom (Or… zs,gt, one less thing to remember)
Open duplicate sheet with only selected rows.

Select based on a pattern:

Key Meaning
| On DATE_START_TIME column, select by regex, like ”-11-“ for November
z| Select rows matching Python expr “DATE_START_TIME [-3:] == '-07'”
To open a new sheet with just those selected rows.

Visualize Data

Key Meaning
. or g. Select columns to graph them. Notice rate changes. Notice times of high use.
+, - Navigate with hjkl, zoom in and out (more)

Further Resources

I have another tutorial at VisiData that merges/joins three CSV tables.

vd-pge.txt · Last modified: 2023/04/12 20:44 by 127.0.0.1