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trynthink / scout

A tool for estimating the future energy use, carbon emissions, and capital and operating cost impacts of energy efficiency and demand flexibility technologies in the U.S. residential and commercial building sectors.
https://scout.energy.gov
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Commercial electricity use is sometimes double counted, other fuel use is missing #394

Closed jtlangevin closed 1 month ago

jtlangevin commented 3 months ago

Per this spreadsheet check it appears that ~0.7 quads of what's currently under the commercial fuel type electricity end use MELs and technology other is actually non-electric energy use (in AEO, it's under the fuel types distillate, residual, LPG, steam coal, motor gas, and kerosene - so should probably be assigned to distillate in the Scout data). Also, it appears that Scout's electricity use for the unspecified building type is double counting water services under both the unspecified and MELs -> water services end uses, ~0.3 quads.

As a result, the Scout commercial electricity totals are about a quad higher than they should be, while the commercial non-electricity totals are ~0.7 quads lower.

This has important implications for full sector emissions and electricity analyses (electric loads overstated, emissions from non-electric end uses understated).

trynthink commented 3 months ago

From @jtlangevin, there appear to be three separate accounting issues.

  1. The MELs->other branch is intended to represent whatever is leftover from end use # 10 ("other") in KDBOUT after the specific MELs techs are identified. But I can't seem to find a place here where those identified MELs are subtracted out from that other, thus it appears to just include them all (and thus they are double counted via this mseg). That's ~0.8 quads double counted electricity in 2050 (all MELs minus water services).
  2. Similarly, in the unspecified end use, water services is included in that end use in KDBOUT (# 11) but I can't find where that is subtracted out from unspecified in that MELs block of the code. That's 0.2 quads double counted electricity in 2050 (water services).
  3. KDBOUT includes other fossil fuels (# 4–8) under unspecified that don't make it into the Scout data because we don't have an other fuel for commercial (do we need to add, or perhaps this should this just be lumped with distillate since it's small and only really occurs in this end use so not worth the trouble?) So that's ~0.65 quads missing fossil in 2050.

Further investigation shows that for item 2, both "water services" and "telecom systems" are double-counted.