A free, browser-based tool that transforms raw electricity data into clear, actionable insights — no programming required.

Energy management begins with clear understanding. In Finland, this is easier said than done. Building managers, planners, and energy professionals all face a common challenge: raw electricity data arrives in countless forms. Fingrid, the national grid operator, gives you tab-separated files with ISO 8601 timestamps. Vare, a local distributor, uses its own date notation. Old utility systems send Excel sheets with Finnish weekday names in the timestamps. Some files record every fifteen minutes. Others give hourly totals. Decimal separators switch between commas and periods. Leap-day entries appear or vanish without warning. Before analysis can start, all this data must be cleaned and unified. This task is tedious and full of errors. Traditionally, only scripting experts or expensive software could handle it.

That barrier is gone. The Energy Consumption Data Analyst was created to solve this exact problem. Born from the Turva-Akku project which is in progress in Savonia University of Applied Sciences, funded by Pohjois-Savon liitto, and the European Union. It is a browser tool open to all. Anyone can upload an Excel or CSV file. In seconds, a full dashboard appears. The software recognizes whether your data is from Fingrid, Vare, or an old Finnish export. It sorts out encoding quirks, decimal commas, and date formats quietly in the background. With one click, users can change time resolution; combine quarter-hour readings to hourly or break hourly data into quarters. Leap-day entries can be removed for clean year-on-year comparisons.

Once the file is loaded, a detailed analysis appears automatically. The dashboard shows the number of rows, the time resolution, the date range, total energy used in kilowatt-hours, and whether price data is included. Below, you see full statistics: mean, median, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, and key percentiles for both consumption and if price is present, cost. The tool accepts a price column in euros per kilowatt-hour. It calculates total costs and builds dual-axis charts to show how market price shifts affect expenses.

Visualization is the core of the app. Eight interactive charts are available. See a full time-series curve with shaded areas. View typical daily patterns by hour. Compare weekday and weekend profiles. Monthly consumption bars make trends clear. An hour-by-day-of-week heatmap reveals daily habits. Monthly boxplots show seasonal changes. A cumulative curve tracks energy over time. Dual-axis price and cost charts complete the picture. Each chart is interactive. Zoom in, pan, and hover for exact values. All charts are made with Plotly, ready for reports and presentations.

Accessibility is a priority, not an afterthought. Around eight percent of men and half a percent of women have colour vision deficiencies. Teams using energy tools include engineers, administrators, officials, and external consultants. The application uses the Wong (2011) colourblind-safe palette, verified for high contrast and visibility under all colour vision types. Information is not shown by colour alone. Charts use shapes, patterns, and text labels. All interactive elements have clear keyboard focus signs, meeting WCAG AA standards. Everyone can read and trust the data.

The technology stack is lightweight and open source. The web interface runs on Streamlit. Data is processed with Pandas. Charts are built in Plotly. Excel files are handled by openpyxl. Everything sits in a single Python file. Deployment, maintenance, and extension are easy. Data processing is cached for speed and repeated tasks are instant. Processed datasets can be downloaded as clean Excel files with one click, ready for spreadsheets, BI tools, or further analysis.

The Energy Consumption Data Analyst helps many users. Facility managers spot peak hours and seasonal patterns to optimize heating and equipment schedules. Municipal planners compare facility data to guide investments and sustainability targets. Researchers and students get instant, visual datasets for academic work; no coding needed. Energy consultants standardize client data from different sources for benchmarking and reporting. Policy makers gain clear, reliable charts for evidence-based decisions on efficiency programs.

The Energy Consumption Data Analyst is available now; no installation, no cost, and no coding required.

The platform is designed for easy extension: if you wish to add new features or customize the tool for your own needs, you are encouraged to do so. For questions, collaboration, or contributions to the project, please contact Savonia University of Applied Sciences.

This work is done with project Kokonaisturvallisuutta sähköenergian tallennuksella (Turva-akku).

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Authors

Shahbaz Baig, RDI Specialist, Savonia University of Applied Sciences, shahbaz.baig@savonia.fi

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