Assessing the time-sensitive impacts of energy efficiency and flexibility in the US building sector

Abstract

The building sector consumes 75% of US electricity, offering substantial energy, cost, and CO 2 emissions savings potential. New technologies enable buildings to flexibly manage electric loads across different times of day and season in support of a low-cost, low-carbon electric grid. Assessing the value of such technologies requires an understanding of building electric load variability at a higher temporal resolution than is demonstrated in previous studies of US building efficiency potential. We adapt Scout, an open-access model of US building energy use, to characterize sub-annual variations in baseline building electricity use, costs, and emissions at the national scale. We apply this baseline in time-sensitive analyses of the energy, cost, and CO 2 emissions savings potential of various degrees of energy efficiency and flexibility, finding that efficiency continues to have strong value in a timesensitive assessment framework while the value of flexibility depends on assumed electricity rates, measure magnitude and duration, and the amount of savings already captured by efficiency.

US building energy efficiency and flexibility as an electric grid resource

“…Further details regarding Scout's general methodological approach can be found in the Supplemental Experimental Procedures of Langevin et al 84 ; an initial effort to translate Scout's annual data sets to a sub-annual temporal resolution, which the current work builds upon, is reported in Satre-Meloy and Langevin. 85 10)…”

Clean Grid Vision: A U.S. Perspective - Chapter 4. Demand-Side Development

“…Three examples below illustrate how energy efficiency and demand response can help cut costs of keeping supply and demand in balance in the United States (Figure 4-5). Source: [36] Nearly all studies that attempt to define energy pathways that comport with the "under 2°C" scenarios show an increasingly strong role for energy efficiency depending on targeted mitigation. Figure 4-6 shows primary energy intensity (a proxy for energy efficiency) over time from over 200 studies collected in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report 5.…”

U.S. Building Energy Efficiency and Flexibility as an Electric Grid Resource

“…Scout's general analysis approach is covered in detail elsewhere [39]; here, we focus on the methodological modifications that were required to enable assessment of the sub-annual (hourly) energy impacts of both energy efficiency and energy flexibility measures for the EMM region geographical resolution. These modifications build upon previous conceptual advances in methods for time-sensitive building efficiency and flexibility assessment [68].…”