UNICON: An Open Dataset of Electricity, Gas and Water Consumption in a Large Multi-Campus University Setting

In this paper we introduce UNICON, a large-scale open dataset on UNIversity CONsumption of utilities, electricity, gas and water. This dataset is publicly released as part of La Trobe University’s commitment to Net Zero Carbon Emissions by 2029, for which we are building the La Trobe Energy AI/Analytics Platform (LEAP) that leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Analytics to analyse, predict and optimize the consumption, generation and utilization of electricity, renewables, gas and water resources. UNICON contains consumption data for La Trobe’s five campuses in geographically distributed regions, across four years, 2018-2021 inclusive. This includes the COVID-19 global pandemic timeline of university shutdown and work from home measures that led to a significant decrease in the consumption of utilities. The consumption data consists of smart electricity meter readings at 15-minute granularity, gas meter readings at hourly intervals and water meter readings at 15-minute intervals. UNICON also contains weather data from the closest weather station to each campus, collected at two-speed latency of 1 minute and 10 minutes. The dataset is annotated with internal events of significance, such as energy conservation measures (ECMs) and other measurement and validation (M&V) activities conducted as part of LEAP optimization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale, comprehensive, open dataset for the three main utilities, electricity, gas, and water consumption in a multi-campus university setting. A high granularity data dictionary and technical validation of the dataset for consumption trends, baseline modelling and forecasting are further contributions of this article that will enable interested research scientists, academics, industry practitioners, sustainability and energy consultants to experiment and evaluate their AI algorithms, models, forecasts, as well as inform the development of energy benchmarks, guidelines and much needed data-driven energy policies.