So lets take a look and see what we find. Looking just for the moment at single family homes, we see that energy use varies greatly depending on home age: older homes use much more energy for heating than newer homes do: Pre-1940s housing uses twice the energy per square foot as post-1980 housing. As a paid subscriber, youll help support this work and also gain access to a members-only slack channel. Over 90% of housing space in the US consists of single family homes and low-rise apartment buildings. Using this, we can get a super granular (if simulated) look at exactly where energy goes in US homes, and see which parameters affect it. The "other" effects, which essentially include behavioural effects, contribute to the increase in consumption after 2014. How does this compare to multifamily housing? Using a variety of data sources (census data, builders surveys, energy consumption surveys, etc.) If you instead compare energy per person though, the US looks way worse - we use somewhere in the neighborhood of 38 million Btus per person per year on average, compared to around 23 million in France. It also gives a more granular look at exactly what energy gets spent on in a home - how much is allocated to heating, to cooling, etc, as well as what type of fuel is used. endobj tells us how energy use varies from region to region, and across different housing types, but the ResStock data lets us look at different combinations of parameters. Housing in the US varies widely along a huge number of dimensions. To facilitate comparison, Ive tried to overlap census regions (comparing different climate zones in the same census region). The overall evolution of these 3 non-behavioural effects is downwards, as they increased energy consumption on average by 2.5 Mtoe/year before 2014 and by 1.8Mtoe/year after. 8 countries with a downward trend accelerating after 2014 (Spain, Italy, Poland, Luxembourg, Croatia, Sweden, Denmark, Finland). The trends by country for heating consumption per m2 of dwellings (Figure 5)mostly correspond to those observed for household energy consumption (Figure 4). For each of the main end-uses, contrasting trends are observed over time (Figure 4). ResStock tells us. Figure 7: Drivers of household energy consumption at EU level. If you think electrification (replacing fossil fuel appliances and heat sources with electric ones) is an important aspect of dealing with climate change, it's useful to know where that will have the greatest impact. <> And the lions share of that extra energy use comes in the form of increased on-site fuel burning - natural gas, fuel oil, or propane. Heres energy use for homes built post 2010 for all different climate regions in the US. Energy surveys, for instance, break down energy use by building type and by age, but if these factors are correlated (which they are), it makes it hard to know which one matters more. %%EOF If you think. they constructed a series of probability distributions for different housing parameters in the US. So lets drill down and look at housing just in a particular climate region. Within multifamily, we see the majority of square footage is in smaller buildings - 2 to 4 unit buildings, or buildings 3 stories or less. stream The result is an extremely fine-grained model of how energy is used across US homes. Changes in energy consumption can be linked to several factors, such as changes in the technical progress of heating systems and associated energy efficiency gains. We dont seem to find much difference in energy use from across similar homes in states with different level of energy code strictness, though the data here is limited. The US has more than twice as much housing space in pre-1940 single family homes as it does in large apartment buildings. There are large disparities between countries, even after adjustment to the same climate, ranging from 0.5 toe/dwelling in Malta to 2.3 toe/dwelling in Luxembourg. The average dwelling in France, for instance, uses around 56,000 Btus per square foot of residential space, fairly typical for a European country [1]. These posts will always remain free, but if you find this work valuable, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber. . It's quite shocking to see that newer homes in the US use more domestic electric energy than the combined requirements for heating and hot water preparation. We see that most building types use energy. No data on m2 for Belgium. Construction Physics is produced in partnership with the Institute for Progress, a Washington, DC-based think tank. Iyr]fY&FG Iv~|7 Xl`|zzB6>a/ 3=k{H1xQ[?e For homes built after 1980, we see that the least energy intensive building type is actually single family homes, something the, . Housing in the US varies widely along a huge number of dimensions. Other effects come into play, such as the evolution of the built surface, energy prices, occupant behaviours, occupancy rates, etc. 0 We see that Mississippi uses about 20% more, but this is mostly driven by the increased energy requirements of a different climate zone - control for this and the difference disappears. The 2015 RECS data confirm this - the larger your house, the less energy per square foot it uses: One confounder here is that European countries often have. Europe is even more diverse than US. than the US, which would skew average energy use higher even if newer homes were significantly more energy efficient than US homes. in proportion to their fraction of overall square footage - single family homes, for instance, make up just over 80% of residential energy use, just a bit more than their total fraction of housing space. Hi Brian, thanks for highlighting our work! California is known as being more stringent with energy codes, having first passed one way back in 1975, and typically leads the way in code strictness. The dashboard lets us compare individual states, though it doesnt let us get quite as granular as we might like (for state-level data, were back to pre-1940, 1940-1980, and post-1980 age buckets). The majority of that square footage is found in single family homes, which make up a bit over 75% of residential square footage. France is roughly average for both energy use and dwelling size. Multifamily buildings (duplexes, apartments, condos, etc.) The household energy consumption (climate corrected)decreases of about 0.7 Mtoe/year for 2000-2014 and increased of about 0.7 Mtoe/year after. 49% of US residential building floor area was built prior to 1980, and more than 10% was built prior to 1940. I suspect the mechanism here is that some types of energy use dont scale linearly with home size - a 1000 square foot apartment and a 2000 square foot house, for instance, might both use similar amounts of energy for the fridge, dishwasher, microwave, washer/dryer, etc. Well also throw into the mix Mississippi, a state with no energy code. Multifamily buildings taller than 3 stories make up just over 3% of US housing by floor area - your mental model of typical apartment building should be a. rather than an urban high-rise (the US actually has more square footage in mobile homes than it does in multifamily buildings taller than 3 stories). The more granular age breakdown also shows that newer housing continues to get more energy efficient - a house built in the 2010s in a cold climate requires roughly 70% less energy for heating than a pre-1960s house. Mississippi doesnt have any parts in a hot-dry climate, so well look at the data for mixed humid and try to scale it accordingly. Energy surveys like the. Another large difference is the amount of non-heating electricity used. A deep renovation is a refurbishment that reduces both the delivered and the final energy consumption of a building by a significant percentage compared with the pre-renovation levels, leading to a very high energy performance, Boosting Building Renovation: What potential and value for Europe? Figure 2: Energy consumption per dwelling, scaled to the EU average climate. A more granular breakdown of home electricity use can be found in the base ResStock data.). Interestingly, in 2019, the share of energy consumption of appliances has almost exceeded that of water heating. Efforts still need to be made to collect technical and activity data, in particular on the quality and volume of renovations in each country, as well as data on the behaviour of households (use of technical and control systems; perception of comfort; influence of energy prices on behaviour, etc.). endstream endobj startxref Better than you might expect. hbbd``b`6`,@,~"x@DHB You can learn more about their work by visiting their, [1] - Energy consumption per dwelling in Europe can be, , average size of European dwellings can be. (called out as Electricity: Other in the graph above), at a bit over 25% of housing energy use in modern housing. We see a roughly similar amount of total energy use (though older SFH do worse than older multifamily buildings), but a different breakdown. So, for instance, for housing age it assumes there are X number of houses built before 1940, Y built between 1940 and 1950, and so on. Homes vary by size, age, location, materials, type of building, amount of insulation, number of windows, heating system, and dozens of other parameters, many of which are correlated with each other, all of which affect the energy use and performance of a building. make up another ~18% of the square footage, and the balance goes to mobile and manufactured homes. How do different states in the same climate region use energy differently? The US has more than twice as much housing space in pre-1940 single family homes as it does in large apartment buildings. As a paid subscriber, youll help support this work and also gain access to a, Construction Physics is produced in partnership with the Institute for Progress, a Washington, DC-based think tank. Houses also tend to have higher thermal mass and require less air conditioning - because of their geographic location, a simple day/night average is suficient to keep most homes most of the year free from heat, with the other side of the coin being increased heating requirements during winter. The households ODEX is currently calculated on the basis of 11 household end-uses or appliances2. We can get a clearer view by looking at energy intensity - how much energy per unit area different types of housing use. ResStock can tell us that as well. The average energy consumption in the EU is 1.3 toe/dwelling in 2019. Well try comparing New York (long history of residential energy codes) to North Dakota (a home rule state that allows local jurisdictions to decide whether to adopt building codes). %`` The ODEX analysis shows that energy efficiency gains in heating use have tended to decrease since 2014 (Figure 5). I couldnt readily find energy consumption just for recent European construction. The biggest difference comes from the fact that multifamily housing uses much more electric heating, and less natural gas or fuel oil, than single family homes do. Lets investigate the possible causes of this slowdown. At the EU level, buildings account for 43% of final consumption. But this is offset by higher energy intensity for things like general electricity use. Multifamily buildings (duplexes, apartments, condos, etc.) You can learn more about their work by visiting their website. A further analysis of the decomposition of effects can be done by looking at the average annual effects (climate corrected for heating)for each period (Figure 8). For another, there will be selection effects at work - if newer houses were built in milder climates that required less heating, new houses would show lower energy consumption purely by virtue of where they were built. Well compare Arizona and California, two states that each have portions in the hot dry climate zone. Energy & Climate Modelling and Forecasting, Market, Competitive and Technology Intelligence, Nearly 30 years of successful market experience, Globally recognised experts and international teams of analysts, In-house forecasting models, databases and intelligence tools, Evolution of households energy consumption patterns across the EU. Why is energy efficiency households slowing down in Europe? A more granular breakdown of home electricity use can be found in the, These posts will always remain free, but if you find this work valuable, I encourage you to, . So what is all that energy being used for? Likewise, differences in energy use between the US and European houses stem from the fact that US homes are much larger than European ones. Mean annual energy savings drop from 5 Mtoe/year before 2014 to 3 Mtoe/year after, which confirms the slowdown in energy savings discussed above. [0] - I believe theres a bug in the dashboard data where single family attached homes are being double-counted, which I have corrected. Ideally wed like to look at age within a building type (and vice versa - look at all building types within a particular age bracket), The result is an extremely fine-grained model of how energy is used across US homes. Most of that reduction comes from reduced energy used for heating. More details in the, See the Energy Efficiency Directive 2012/27/EU. So lets take a look and see what we find. ResStock takes all this into account. 2016, Directorate general for Internal Policies (European Parliament). On behalf of all EU Energy Agencies and of the European Commission, Enerdata has created a database providing unique data on energy consumption by end-use. For space heating, the reduction of the unit consumption per m2 has significantly slowed down since 2014 in most of the largest EU countries, especially in Germany, France, UK and The Netherlands (Figure 5). Energy savings have more than offset this increase by reducing consumption by 86.5 Mtoe. One method would be to compare similar houses built in similar climates in two different states that have different levels of energy code strictness. (This breakdown comes from the fact that the tool was designed to aid in energy retrofits, and so is focused on thermal uses as opposed to, say, energy consumption for kitchen appliances. For the period 2014-2019, the trends are more contrasted between countries, with mainly 3 types of evolution (Figure 2): At the EU 27 level, the decreasing trend of energy consumption per dwelling is slowing down after 2014 (-1.3%/year for 2000-2014 and -0.2%/year for 2014-2019). ), a very neat interface for exploring a huge simulation of US residential energy use built by NREL (a similar one for commercial buildings is coming later this year.) Arizona, on the other hand, adopted energy codes much later (it first adopted one in 2009), and has a history of conservative governors restricting jurisdictions from implementing more stringent ones. How do different states in the same climate region use energy differently? The above is just for single family, but we see a roughly similar energy budget across different housing types. So smaller housing units use more energy per square foot despite using less energy overall. We see a fairly uniform decrease in energy intensity with age - no matter the type, older homes use significantly more energy per square foot than newer ones, with the oldest homes using twice as much or more than the newer ones. Among the activity effects, which tend to increase energy consumption, some of them decrease after 2014, such as more dwellings or larger homes, while the more appliances effect slightly increases. (This all roughly matches with what we found when we previously looked at the US building stock.). , for instance, break down energy use by building type and by age, but if these factors are correlated (which they are), it makes it hard to know which one matters more. What does it look like if we compare across climate regions? Other thermal energy uses make up the second biggest chunk - air conditioning and water heating combined make up another 30% of energy use in post-1980 homes. The data comes from. How does this compare to other countries? This is partially offset by increased use of energy for cooling, but on balance hot/humid housing still uses just about 60-70% of the energy per square foot that cold climate housing uses (depending on the year.). We see that most building types use energy roughly in proportion to their fraction of overall square footage - single family homes, for instance, make up just over 80% of residential energy use, just a bit more than their total fraction of housing space. For one, it lumps in a bunch of radically different housing types together (which is why average energy intensity includes both electric and natural gas heating.) After thermal uses comes electricity for lights, appliances, computers, etc. Almost all this extra energy use comes from burning fuel on-site. Figure 4: Annual growth rate of energy consumption by end-use. It then further subdivides it into energy for heating, cooling, water heating, vents/fans, and other. ResStock tells us. These effects can be of several types, e.g., direct (increase in consumption of heating energy because of better insulated homes or more efficient heating systems), energy market related (energy consumption increases as fuel costs decreases, as it has been the case in Ireland after 2014), For example, in France 35% of the renovation works between 2014 and 2016 were over one aspect only. It includes everything from passive houses to brutalist and khrushchyovka-style blocks of flats made in the 60 and 70 out of plain concrete and no insulation, some dependent of large-scale waste heat from nearby industry. endstream Your browser does not support javascript! Increases in housing stock and more consuming lifestyles (more appliances and larger homes)have contributed to an increase in consumption of 72.5 Mtoe. On a square-foot basis, single family homes actually use less energy than multifamily housing. Ive done what I can to cross-check numbers against other data (such as RECS and census data), but we should take any conclusions with a large grain of salt. Based on the methodology developed in the European Odyssee-Mure project, which allows to distinguish between several effects, we have highlighted a slowdown in energy efficiency progress in the residential sector at EU level since 2014. Heres energy intensity for single family homes in the cold/very cold climate region: We see the biggest difference is energy for heating - houses in cold climates use twice the energy per square foot for heating than the national average for modern homes, and more than three times the average of pre-1940s homes. Like with single family vs multifamily, differences in cross-country energy use seem to mostly come from differences in housing size, and the US has much larger homes than Europe does: One confounder here is that European countries often have much older housing stocks than the US, which would skew average energy use higher even if newer homes were significantly more energy efficient than US homes. This makes it difficult to understand what actually matters for improving energy efficiency. Most of that extra energy comes from heating - ~65% of energy use in pre-1940s homes goes towards heating, compared to ~40% in post-1980s homes, and pre-1940s housing uses more energy per square foot for heating than post-1980 housing uses overall. Taken together, those homes use around 11.4 quadrillion BTus of energy annually, which is a bit over 20% (as of 2014) of all the energy used in the US. 396 0 obj <>stream Please, I recently came across the National Renewable Energy Laboratories Building Typology. The ResStock data in the dashboard is somewhat messy, and care should be taken interpreting it. It also gives a more granular look at exactly what energy gets spent on in a home - how much is allocated to heating, to cooling, etc, as well as what type of fuel is used. From what I understand, the normal electric hookup in the US is 2x120V, 100A (24KW), there is a move to 200Amps and older homes tend to have 50 Amps lines. Homes vary by size, age, location, materials, type of building, amount of insulation, number of windows, heating system, and dozens of other parameters, many of which are correlated with each other, all of which affect the energy use and performance of a building. For domestic hot water, consumption has also been increasing since 2000, but at a rate that has clearly accelerated since 2014 (around 1%/year)compared to 2000-2014 (almost stable). This was surprising to me, since I frequently read stories about how dense urban areas are more energy efficient - I expected multifamily construction to use lower energy per square foot. To deal with this, ResStock uses a statistical approach. Could you let me know more about the double-counting issue you're seeing (contact info: Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), Residential Energy Consumption Survey confirms, https://www.nrel.gov/research/staff/eric-wilson.html. They therefore represent a major challenge for achieving the EU's climate and environmental objectives. The data comes from ResStock, a simulation designed to model US residential energy use at a much greater level of detail than had been done previously. Several aspects can explain this phenomenon: Figure 7 illustrates the impact of the main drivers of household energy consumption. For your security, we need to re-authenticate you. Heres single family use for the hot-humid climate zone (ie: the south): We see that homes in hot/humid climates use about 70% less energy for heating than homes in cold climates. First, a bit about the source. We also see that mobile homes are the most energy intensive housing type by a fairly wide margin - a mobile home will use somewhere around 40% more energy per square foot than other housing types. This was surprising to me, since I frequently read stories about how dense urban areas are. (replacing fossil fuel appliances and heat sources with electric ones) is an important aspect of dealing with climate change, it's useful to know where that will have the greatest impact. This chart shows the breakdown in energy use (trillions of Btus) and energy intensity (thousands of Btus per square foot) for each building type and age bracket of residential housing. Low energy prices which do not encourage renovation work with long payback periods and lead to higher heating temperature (rebound effect). (The NREL report makes specific mention of this as something important to address, but I suspect this is mostly a self-solving problem, as these tend to drop out of the building stock much faster than conventional homes do.). How does 1940s housing in the Northeast vary from 2010s housing in the South? 49% of US residential building floor area was built prior to 1980, and more than 10% was built prior to 1940. Figure 1: Final energy consumption of residential buildings in the EU. The warmer climate in 2019 further reduced consumption by 2 Mtoe. This is 50%-100% more that what the equivalent house in Europe would have - many apartments are served by a single 32A/230V line (7KW). Multifamily buildings taller than 3 stories make up just over 3% of US housing by floor area - your mental model of typical apartment building should be a garden apartment rather than an urban high-rise (the US actually has more square footage in mobile homes than it does in multifamily buildings taller than 3 stories). 368 0 obj <> endobj Over 90% of housing space in the US consists of single family homes and low-rise apartment buildings. These distributions were constructed based on correlations between the various parameters - the distribution of housing ages looks very different in the Northeast than the South, for instance, and the amount of insulation will vary depending on how old your house is. It then further subdivides it into energy for heating, cooling, water heating, vents/fans, and other. Finally, for space heating, the consumption has been stable since 2014, and follows a period of decline (-0.7%/year over 2000-2014). [1] - Energy consumption per dwelling in Europe can be found here, average size of European dwellings can be found here. Other than mobile homes, we dont see a huge amount of variation in energy intensity between different types of housing (single family, multifamily, etc.) (This all roughly matches with what we found when we, Turning to age, we see a relatively wide spread across different age brackets (which makes sense, considering how. Our analysis of energy consumption trends in the building sector based on data from the Odyssee project highlights a break in the trend after 2014 linked to two phenomena: the slowdown in energy efficiency progress after 2014 and the growing importance of behavioural effects in energy consumption. The dashboard breaks down energy use into electricity consumption, and on-site fuel consumption (burning natural gas, propane, or fuel oil.) This chart shows the breakdown in energy use (trillions of Btus) and energy intensity (thousands of Btus per square foot) for each building type and age bracket of residential housing. Lighting and air-conditioning each account for less than 1%. Residential buildings account for two thirds of this consumption and are associated with a high untapped energy savings potential. Different quantities that should equal each other dont (for instance, if you divide the total energy use by the total square footage for each building type, you get a different energy use per unit area than the dashboard provides), and it seems to miscount quantities in some locations (it appears to double-count single family attached homes, for instance.) Specifically, ODEX1 is calculated by weighting the index of each end-use by the share of the end-use in the sector's energy consumption. Household energy efficiency has improved by 29% at EU level between 2000 and 2019 (or 1.8%/year)as shown by the energy efficiency index ODEX (equal to 71 in 2019, Figure 6). Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in. Virtually no difference, once again. 0 subscriptions will be displayed on your profile (edit). Per the model, as of 2018 the US has about 250 billion square feet of residential floor space, spread across about 100 million individual buildings [0]: The majority of that square footage is found in single family homes, which make up a bit over 75% of residential square footage. Turning to age, we see a relatively wide spread across different age brackets (which makes sense, considering how slowly homes leave the building stock.) But energy use per square foot averaged across all US housing is kind of a weird metric. Can we get a sense from this data how much energy codes matter? As far as the simulated data is concerned, there doesnt seem to be much of an impact on different state energy codes on energy use. This makes it difficult to understand what actually matters for improving energy efficiency. 6 0 obj (This breakdown comes from the fact that the tool was designed to aid in energy retrofits, and so is focused on thermal uses as opposed to, say, energy consumption for kitchen appliances. make up another ~18% of the square footage, and the balance goes to mobile and manufactured homes. And its useful to look at energy breakdown for the country as a whole. How does this compare to a less thermally intensive climate zone? Figure 5: Households heating consumption per m2 (climate corrected), *Notes: 2002 for UK, 2003 for Portugal; no data available before 2008 for Luxembourg and before 2016 for Malta. Re: messy data, the sample size can get low for some of the rows (you can see the sample count if you hover over each data point; anything less than 100 samples will have higher uncertainty). - I expected multifamily construction to use lower energy per square foot.

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