Hourly U.S. Building Electricity Use, Cost, and Emissions Baselines to Support Time-Sensitive Analyses of Energy Efficiency and Flexibility Measures

These data underpin an analysis of the time-sensitive impacts of energy efficiency and flexibility measures in the U.S. building sector using Scout (scout.energy.gov), a reproducible and granular model of U.S. building energy use developed by the U.S. national labs for the U.S. Department of Energy's Building Technologies Office. The analysis applies sub-annual adjustments to U.S. baseline building energy use, cost, and emissions in order to characterize how these metrics vary across hour of the day, season, and geographic region in the U.S. building sector. These adjustments are based on daily energy load, price, and emissions shapes from various data sources and are used to re-apportion baseline energy, cost, and emissions totals from EIA's Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) Reference Case projections across all hours of a year. The resulting sub-annual baselines are specified by building sector, end use, region, and season and can be used in analyses of building efficiency and flexibility measures to quantify their time-sensitive impacts at the national scale. Analyses of these data demonstrate that energy efficiency measures continue to show strong value under a time-sensitive framework while the value of flexibility depends on assumed electricity rates, measure magnitude and duration, and the amount of savings already captured by efficiency. The data uploaded below include CSV files that show hourly energy use, cost, and emissions totals for the U.S. building sector as well as by end-use, region, and season. An additional CSV includes residential and commercial price intensities (USD/quad) for all hours of the day based on different time-of-use (TOU) rate data from the U.S. Utility Rate Database (URDB). Further detail on each of these CSVs is given below: 'TSV_baseline_totals.csv': this file shows hourly total energy, cost, and emissions estimates for commercial and residential buildings in 2018 and 2030. It presents these estimates in Quads (source), Quads (site), and TWh (site). For the cost totals, it presents two estimates for each year and building sector, including one using the median TOU rate from the URDB and one using the average retail rate for the corresponding building sector. For converting source energy to site, total delivered electricity and electricity-related losses data for the residential and commercial sector are drawn from AEO Summary Table A2. 'TSV_baseline_end-use.csv': this file shows hourly energy, cost, and emissions estimates for commercial and residential buildings in 2018 and 2030 broken out by building end-use. It presents totals in terms of both source and site energy as above and presents cost totals based on the median TOU rate for each building sector from the URDB. 'TSV_baseline_region.csv': this file shows hourly energy, cost, and emissions estimates for commercial and residential space heating and cooling end uses in 2018 and 2030 for each American Institute of Architects (AIA) climate zone. It presents totals in terms of both source and site energy as above and presents cost totals based on the median TOU rate for each building sector from the URDB. 'TSV_baseline_region_season.csv': this file shows a similar disaggregation of the data as ‘TSV_baseline_region.csv’, but it further disaggregates results by season. The seasonal definitions are as follows: 'intermediate' (October to November; March to April), 'winter' (November to February), and 'summer' (May to September). 'TSV_annual_price_intensities.csv': this file presents annual hourly price intensities for the commercial and residential building sectors in 2018 and 2030 based on different TOU rate data from the URDB. Three different rate structures are included for each building sector, and these are the 5th, 50th, and 95th percentile of all existing commercial and residential TOU rates in the URDB in terms of their peak to off-peak price ratio