1. Assessing the time-sensitive impacts of energy efficiency and flexibility in the US building sector
- Author
-
Aven Satre-Meloy and Jared Langevin
- Subjects
energy efficiency ,energy flexibility ,time-sensitive analysis ,US building sector ,Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering ,TD1-1066 ,Environmental sciences ,GE1-350 ,Science ,Physics ,QC1-999 - 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 time-sensitive 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.
- Published
- 2019
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