Predicting Electricity, Water and Natural Gas Consumption in Municipal Buildings in the City of Los Angeles 

The Challenge

The City of Los Angeles is undertaking various initiatives to track and reduce energy and water consumption in existing buildings. Currently, there are significant barriers such as unreliable data and non-standardized tracking mechanisms in obtaining consumption data from the City’s building stock. Recognizing this challenge, the objective of Howe’s project is to create energy and water prediction tools that will determine the future needs based on the historical record of municipal buildings using regression models. 

Results

• Building managers only need to know the building type, year built and square footage to get an accurate estimate of their energy and water consumption under the developed regression model: 
  • Square footage provides strong predictive power in the regression. For instance, larger buildings typically consume more electricity than smaller buildings while accounting for square footage normalizes consumption comparisons across buildings.  
  • Accounting for the variations in structure use is essential in predicting nature resource consumption. For instance, fire stations behave differently than libraries while municipal office spaces behave differently than police stations. This means not only the occupant behavior shifts between these buildings, but they will have different infrastructure requirements.   
  • Older buildings are constructed using relatively outdated and inefficient technologies. Knowing the age of a structure can offer valuable insight into how well the building is performing and whether it is due for a retrofit. 
• The developed regression model is estimated to be 90-95% accurate in predicting resource consumption. This is sufficiently accurate for building managers to anticipate their load for any given month and take steps to reduce their usage in the future. 

Deliverable and Impact

Howe has produced an energy and water usage prediction tool for use in municipalities, including Los Angeles. Additionally, he has developed a final report, “Predicting Electricity, Water and Natural Gas Consumption in Municipal Buildings in the City of Los Angeles” for distribution within the City of Los Angeles, UCLA Institute for the Environment and Sustainability, and UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research.