Getting building level features

NeurIPS 2023 Citylearn Challenge
#1

for a given building at a given time step, i can get the electrical load using the method env.buildings[0].energy_simulation.solar_generation[env.time_step]. How can i do the same for carbon intensity from the environment since i cannot access it in the building.

Additionally, how do i get the following features for a given building Vintage, Area (ft2), Heat pump (kW), Heater (kW), DHW storage (kWh), Battery (kWh), PV (kW)

#2

@Chemago you can get carbon intensity using env.buildings[0].carbon_intensity.carbon_intensity. This time series is the same for all buildings and is in unit of kgco2e/kwh. Alternatively, you can use env.buildings[0].net_electricity_consumption_emission which differs across buildings and is in units of kgco2e.

Vintage and Area are not stored anywhere in the environment. For the others:

  • Heat pump (kW): env.buildings[0].cooling_device.nominal_power
  • Heater (kW): env.buildings[0].dhw_device.nominal_power
  • DHW storage (kWh): env.buildings[0].dhw_storage.capacity
  • Battery (kWh): env.buildings[0].electrical_storage.capacity
  • PV (kW): env.buildings[0].pv.nominal_power
Accessing carbon intensity at a given point in time
#3

Got it thnks.

A followup question.

Given that these features are not in observations, if they are used for training, can they be used during online evaluation (asking because the function compute_forecast only takes observations as input and the environment is not accessible to the ExamplePredictor class).

1 Like