08

Project 08

Solar energy production forecaster

Forecasting monthly solar PV output across Calgary municipal installations using seasonal decomposition and XGBoost on 2,300+ production records

0.86 R-squared
Time series Regression XGBoost Seasonal decomposition Calgary open data

Interactive dashboard

Four pages covering production monitoring, multi-step forecasting, facility benchmarking, and return-on-investment analysis.

Production

Monthly kWh output trends per facility with seasonal pattern overlays and year-over-year comparisons

Forecast

Multi-step iterative predictions with confidence intervals for upcoming production months

Facility comparison

Side-by-side benchmarking of solar installations by capacity utilization and output efficiency

ROI

Return-on-investment calculator based on forecast output, energy rates, and installation costs

Model performance

R-squared

0.86

XGBoost regressor on temporal holdout set

MAPE

~20%

Mean absolute percentage error across all facilities

Records

2.3K

Monthly production readings from municipal solar installations

How it works

Fetched solar PV production and site data from Calgary Open Data via Socrata API. Engineered cyclical month encoding, rolling averages (3/6/12-month), and lag features per facility. Compared Ridge Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost with temporal train-test split and iterative multi-step forecasting.

Socrata API
Feature engineering
Seasonal decomposition
XGBoost
Multi-step forecast