Efficiency in YYC: Visualizing The City of Calgary's Energy Consumption

To combat the alarming global issue of climate change, the City of Calgary has been leading the way in implementing clean energy programs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the transit system's LRT trains are now fully powered by wind power, and a growing solar power system delivers electricity to its municipal buildings (Dodge and Thompson, 2016). In a dramatic initiative that is observable from space, Calgary has recently completed its conversion of 80,000 streetlights, which used to account for 20% of the city's total energy consumption in 2012, to 50% more efficient LED lamps (The City of Calgary, 2018c; Rieger, 2015). In addition to the environmental grounds for these innovations, the city will enjoy economic benefits not only through direct energy savings, but also on the incoming carbon taxes imposed by the governments of Alberta and Canada. The City of Calgary continues planning for its future with ambitious goals of reducing city-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 20% below 2005 levels before 2020 and by 80% before 2050 (The City of Calgary, 2018a). We aim to explore and visualize its actual consumption rate by taking advantage of an open dataset recently released by the city. In this table, the monthly energy consumption is reported for of each of Calgary's facilities and infrastructure components over the past nine years (The City of Calgary, 2018b). This is an informative and unique dataset as comprehensive data at this level of detail and frequency are not publically available from other major Canadian cities or even for residential and private sector properties.