Conservation Improvement Program in Minnesota: Addressing an Organization Challenge with ArcGIS Online

The purpose of this professional paper is threefold: First, the paper introduces the topic of energy efficiency and related policy in Minnesota. This is achieved through a brief analysis of research showing the multiple benefits of energy efficiency and a deep dive into the Minnesota’s energy efficiency/conservation policy known as the Conservation Improvement Program (CIP). This is intended to give the reader an overview of energy efficiency and the specifics of the relevant legislation in Minnesota. The second goal of this paper is to identify an organizational challenge that the Minnesota Commerce Department’s (Commerce) CIP team faces. This challenge has to do with a lack of CIP messaging and data visualization of CIP results and benefits. I addressed this challenge by making ArcGIS maps that display CIP information on the electric utility service territories in Minnesota. This culminated in an ArcGIS Online ‘Story Map’ that is intended to benefit Commerce staff by presenting easy to understand CIP quantitative and qualitative information for a legislative or general public audience. The third goal of my paper is to explain the methodology for creating my ArcGIS maps. Commerce staff will be able to use this as a reference in order to aggregate, manage, and create future CIP maps