Power Y’all: Applying R to electricity pricing in Texas

The goal of this talk is to demonstrate that developing a scalable Minimal Viable Product (MVP) data product using the R stack is not only feasible but efficient.

The retail electricity market in Texas is deregulated - thus, in many parts of Texas, consumers can choose their electricity company. Shopping for electricity involves comparing provider prices, reading fine print and, in many cases, taking a gamble. The market is full of inefficiencies, with both sellers and buyers lacking information and tools to make good pricing decisions. Power Y’all is an online comparison tool addressing these market failures with the goal of serving both consumers and electricity providers.

The first step is, of course, creating an MVP that touches all of the main activities. A further goal for the MVP is to design it while keeping modularity and scalability in mind. Typical development solutions involve Python combined with other programming languages and tools. However, R and RStudio offer sufficient tools to develop all the MVP components using the R stack - this is the goal (and challenge) of this project.

Key packages and components: httr and rvest to obtain electricity plan data, RPostgres and jsonlite to store and transfer data and text, tidyverse to wrangle the data, Shiny to create dashboards, and Shiny Server to host Shiny apps (both consumer and internal facing). Modularizing the application using plumber APIs hosted in Docker containers allows further scalability with the additional benefit of being able to update modules with code written in other programming languages.

Presenter: Mike Badescu (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikebadescu/)
When: November 17, 10am-12am
Where: Gorman Lecture Hall, Univ. of Dallas

Please come to learn, collaborate, network, and share with fellow R users in the Dallas metroplex area.