Calgary's municipal buildings energy consumption analysis and forecast

Marcelo Guarido, David J. Emery, Daniel O. Trad, Kristopher A. Innanen

CO₂ emissions are pointed to as the main cause of Global Warming, and countries around the world are working to reduce their domestic emissions. Canada set to get to zeronet emissions by 2050 and is taking action on different fronts. Although the emissions per capita are reducing, the absolute emissions of the country are still increasing over the years. As part of the country’s efforts, the Government of Calgary has set the same goal. We analyzed the Calgary corporate buildings data, which contains energy consumption from different types of municipal facilities and pointed that the overall electricity consumption in the city is declining, while natural gas consumption seems to be following an opposite trend. As a decision-making tool, forecasting models can predict what will be the future energy consumption. However, for that, more complete data is required, containing not only the energy consumption of each building but as well structural information about the same. We performed forecasting of global electricity and natural gas consumption using three different models: SARIMA + XGBoost, Facebook Prophet, and MARS. The first one showed to behave better with the seasonality and outliers, predicting a steady reduction of electricity consumption for the next three years, while the natural gas consumption will, if no action is taken, continue at the same level. Lastly, we did the impact analysis of the reduction of electricity consumption of the Calgary streetlights since 2016, due to an action of the Government of Calgary to change the light bulbs to more energy-efficient ones and estimated that the savings are feeding the equivalent of more than 5000 houses in Alberta.