December 23, 2015

MEMORANDUM FOR: JOHN CONTI

ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR FOR ENERGY 

ANALYSIS

 PAUL HOLTBERG 

TEAM LEADER, ANALYSIS INTEGRATION TEAM

JAMES TURNURE

DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF ENERGY CONSUMPTION &

EFFICIENCY ANALYSIS

FROM: BUILDINGS CONSUMPTION & EFFICIENCY ANALYSIS 

TEAM

SUBJECT: First AEO2016 Buildings Sector Working Group Meeting Summary,

presented on 12-08-2015

Attendees: Lori Aniti (EIA OEA)

John Conti (EIA OEA)

Fred Mayes (EIA OEA)

Kelly Perl (EIA OEA)

David Daniels (EIA OEA)

Bill McNary (EIA OES)

Joelle Michaels (EIA OES)

Carolyn Hronis (EIA OES)

Hiro Minato (EIA OES)

Bill Mytsak (EIA OES)

Maggie Woodward (EIA OES)

Colin McMillan (NREL)

Jack Mayernik (DOE EERE)

Amir Roth (DOE EERE)

Jenah Zweig (DOE EPSA)

Attending by WebEx/Phone: Danielle Mayclin (EIA OES)

Jay Olsen (EIA OES)

Marc Lafrance (DOE EERE)

John Ackerly (Alliance for Green Heat)

Jennifer Amann (ACEEE)

Justin Baca (SEIA)

Ines Azevedo (Carnegie Mellon)

Etan Gumerman (Duke University)

Jeff Harris (ASE)

Xiaojing Sun (Georgia Tech)

Marilyn Brown (Georgia Tech)

Frances Wood (OnLocation)

Kenneth Dubin (OnLocation)

Andrew Feierman (IMT)

Whitney Herndon (Rhodium Group)
2

Patrick Luckow (Synapse)

David White (Synapse)

Alan Cooke (PNNL)

Roderick Jackson (ORNL)

Isha Sharma (Energy and Resources Institute)

Buildings Team Attendees: Erin Boedecker

Behjat Hojjati

Kevin Jarzomski

David Peterson

Carol Brotman White

WORKING GROUP PRESENTATION FOR DISCUSSION PURPOSES ONLY

DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE AS RESULTS ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE

The buildings presentation provided a discussion of the updates underway and anticipated for 

AEO2016. Topics presented include AEO2016 content and schedule; modeling of efficiency 

programs for the Clean Power Plan; updates to federal equipment standards, end-use technology 

characterizations and residential stock efficiency and switching parameters; changes in commercial 

sector outputs from the Macroeconomic Activity Module; modeling distributed generation; and 

updates to historical estimates. Attendees were also asked to provide comments or suggestions for 

AEO2016 and beyond, especially in the areas of growth of “other” electricity use and knowledge 

of research/references on end-use interactions, energy impacts and costs of energy efficiency 

programs, and building code compliance. The presentation materials are provided as a separate 

attachment.

Discussion/questions:

1. Clean Power Plan (CPP): Discussion of the policy assumptions for the CPP final rule

prompted a question about whether energy efficiency rebates will be in the Reference 

case. EIA response: Yes, unless the CPP is blocked by court action.

2. Energy Efficiency Actions: One stakeholder requested the capability to represent 

energy efficiency actions at the state level rather than in the form of utility rebates so 

that electricity rates would not be affected. Is that capability there? EIA response: EIA 

has no current plans to modify the current approach that takes subsidy and program 

costs into account.

3. Distributed Generation (DG): Discussion of DG cost and performance updates led to 

a request for draft characteristics to be circulated. EIA response: cost and performance 

characteristics are definitely not yet final and cannot be circulated at this time.

4. Solar PV: EIA mentioned the recent addition of monthly historical generation 

estimates for distributed solar photovoltaics (PV) to published statistics and that the 
3

presentation materials do not (but should) include EIA’s updated calculation of solar 

generation in NEMS based on PVWatts5.

1

5. Community Solar: Which alternative modeling methodology for residential solar PV 

represents community solar? EIA response: neither; both options represent individual 

residential rooftop solar PV, not community solar. Stakeholders added that community 

solar characteristics vary even at the jurisdiction level and would be very hard to model.

6. Demand Shifting: As part of the discussion asking for stakeholder input, participants 

asked if control strategies for demand shifting are included in the models. EIA 

response: building controls are not explicitly modeled at the current time. Effects on 

energy consumption and intensity of use would be picked up in calibrating to historical 

estimates.

7. Storage Technologies: One stakeholder asked if storage technologies, including 

distributed storage are represented. EIA response: not in the end-use models; pumped 

storage is represented in the electricity sector, but that the effect is a shift in demand, 

not a change in the level of demand. EIA attendees explained that the electricity market 

module (EMM) has a peak response to demand up to a few percentage points and that 

end-use demand gets mapped to electricity module regions. EIA attendees highlighted 

the forthcoming publication of “near real-time” hourly electricity data on the EIA 

website. The same stakeholder continued to advocate for representing pumped storage

in the end-use models.

8. Summary: Overall, few-to-no criticisms of our current modeling efforts or suggestions 

of data sources we should be using but are not; however, there was a sense of requests 

for the development of additional model capabilities based on some of the points above.

9. Follow-up: After the meeting, DOE attendees provided additional information in a few 

areas where EIA requested input. Specifically, attendees provided additional 

information on recent or scheduled appliance standards that were not highlighted during 

the working group meeting. Attendees also provided a DOE point of contact for field 

studies on building energy code compliance that are currently in progress.

Next Buildings Working Group meeting: February 18, 2016

 1 PVWatts5 is the most recent version of an energy cost and production calculator developed by the National 

Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).