Scheduling Municipal Carbon Abatement Projects Under Uncertainty

Abstract

Addressing city-level energy-related emissions is a key challenge in wider decarbonization efforts. However, the ability to take effective planning decisions is constrained by budget, staffing resources, political cycles, and the need to consider multiple, competing policy objectives. Moreover, project selection is often conducted with little-to-no consideration to uncertainty in project cost, duration, or abatement potential. We suggest that applying established scheduling methods could help city planners make more effective emissions reduction planning decisions, especially if project uncertainties are considered in the scheduling process. We demonstrate such an approach to a case study of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, and consider actual projects adopted by the city. We adopt a simplified representation of project emissions abatement potential based upon whether projects addressed existing or new infrastructure and the actors involved. Our results show that projects selected by the city have lower expected carbon abatement potential and generally offer lower cost savings to the community than those selected by algorithm-based scheduling methods. Future work will further develop the applied uncertainty quantification methods and alternative case studies.