Heating degree days – https://open.canada.ca/
Canada’s weather has incredible extremes. Over the course of a year, the same location can experience intense heat or cold. And at the same moment across the country, there can be a range of temperatures and weather conditions.
To normalize weather information, we can consider how many days it is necessary to heat a building. That’s the core definition of a heating degree day – it quantifies the amount of days within a year when the temperature is below a standardized threshold. At that temperature, most buildings will have to use furnaces or boilers to keep the temperature comfortable.
Heating degree days (HDD) allows for fair comparisons of energy efficiency. For example, you can compare a building on Vancouver Island to a similar sized facility in northern Manitoba. There are evident different in climate, but the HDD enables a fair comparison of energy usage. It helps answer the question: which facility is more energy efficient? The building on Vancouver Island will use less energy, but is it an efficient use of energy?
The open dataset from Natural Resources Canada includes the current calculation for heating degree days across Canada.
