DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4737655
title: U.S. building energy efficiency and flexibility as an electric grid resource (Data and Code)

description: These data underpin an analysis of the near- and long-term technical potential bulk power grid resource offered by best available U.S. building efficiency and flexibility measures. Using multiple openly-available modeling frameworks supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, including Scout, ResStock, and the Commercial Building Prototype Models, we pair bottom-up simulations of measures' building-level impacts with regional representations of the building stock and its projected electricity use to estimate the impacts of multiple building efficiency and flexibility scenarios on hourly regional system loads across the contiguous U.S. in 2030 and 2050. We find that demand-side management via building efficiency and flexibility could avoid up to nearly ⅓ of annual fossil-fired generation and ½ of fossil-fired capacity additions after 2020.<strong> </strong>Results are reported at both the national and regional scales and are disaggregated by building type and end use, facilitating a quantitative understanding of the role that buildings as a whole and specific building technologies or operational approaches can play in the future evolution of the U.S. electricity system. The four ZIP files that make up this data record are interpreted as follows: <strong>Measure_Data.zip: </strong>Includes the Scout energy conservation measure (ECM) JSON definitions that were used to generate the main baseline and efficient/flexible scenario results ("Baseline_Measures" and "Efficiency_Flexibility_Measures", respectively), as well as side cases that assess the sensitivity of results to higher levels of variable renewable penetration ("High_RE_Sensitivity_Analysis") and a high degree of building load electrification ("High_Electrification_Measures"). Each measure set includes supporting 8760 load savings shapes in the sub-folder "Savings_Shapes". Additional details about defining and interpreting Scout measures with time-sensitive analysis features are available here. <strong>Results_Data.zip: </strong>Includes the main and side case results data. Baseline-case outcomes, which are consistent with the EIA 2019 Annual Energy Outlook, are stored in "Baseline_Loads". Efficient/flexible scenario results are stored in "Efficiency_Flexibility_Measure_Impacts_Individual" and "Efficiency_Flexibility_Measure_Impacts_Portfolio," respectively, where the former includes results for individual measures in our analysis without considering any interactions across measures, and the latter includes results for aggregations of energy efficiency (EE), demand flexibility (DF), and efficiency and flexibility (EE+DF) portfolios that do consider interactions across measures in each portfolio. Results for the high electrification side case are stored in the "High_Electrification" sub-folder in the EE+DF case only. Results for the high renewable sensitivity analysis are stored in "High_RE_Sensitivity_Analysis", and residential and commercial 8760 savings shape outcomes for each of the EE, DF, and EE+DF measure portfolios and five of the 2019 EIA Electricity Market Module (EMM) regions (p.6) of focus are stored in "Sector_Level_8760s". <strong>Source_Code.zip: </strong>Includes the source code needed to translate the measure inputs provided in "Measures_Data.zip" into the outputs provided in "Results_Data.zip". The core set of files required to execute the main analysis results is stored in "Base_Code_Package", while variants to certain files in the core package needed to execute the high renewable sensitivity and high electrification side cases are stored in "Code_Variants". In general, the process of running an analysis is as described in the Scout Quick Start Guide; however, the file "ecm_prep_batch.py" should be substituted for "ecm_prep.py" and the file "run_batch.py" should be substituted for "run.py". These batch files execute multiple versions of "ecm_prep.py" and "run.py" that are tailored to generate individual measure and whole portfolio results for annual, net peak summer and winter, and net off-peak summer and winter metrics (individual measures: "ecm_prep.json," "ecm_prep_spa," "ecm_prep_wpa," "ecm_prep_sta," "ecm_prep_wta"; whole portfolio: "ecm_results.json," "ecm_results_spa.json," "ecm_results_wpa.json," and "ecm_results_sta.json," and "ecm_results_wta.json"). Results for the side cases are generated by replacing the versions of the "ecm_prep" and "run" files included in the "Base_Code_Package" folder with those in the "Code_Variants" folder. Sector-level 8760 shapes are generated using the "--sect_shapes" command line option as described here. See Scout's Local Execution Tutorials for more details on how to develop Scout inputs and outputs. <strong>Supporting_Data.zip: </strong>Includes supplemental data files provided by EIA that describe key inputs and outputs to the Electricity Market Module in the AEO 2019 run of the National Energy Modeling System ("EIA EMM Data (AEO 2019)"), as well as raw EnergyPlus outputs that were used to develop the baseline Scout hourly load shape file found in "./Source_Code/Base_Code_Package/supporting_data/tsv_data/tsv_load.json".