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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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Developing micro segments in conjunction with ongoing Excel work #8

Closed jtlangevin closed 9 years ago

jtlangevin commented 9 years ago

We need to develop a market micro segments database for our analysis framework to reference, which can be updated as new AEO, RECS/CBECS, and other relevant data sources are refreshed. These micro segments could be defined through a tree structure, such as for a highly insulating window: Climate Zone X -> Commercial Buildings -> Commercial Building Type X -> Heating Energy -> Heating Energy Lost through Windows (note in that particular case, we might create a parallel segment for Cooling Energy to identify effects of higher window insulation on cooling energy).

Some of this work is already being done in the existing Excel framework to bring the tool up to AEO 2014 and ensure the micro segments are correctly defined. There is a question of whether the above efforts may be combined with this ongoing Excel work to save time. One possibility discussed is to establish a code that updates all the micro segments (or perhaps just the micro segments not already updated) and pastes the resultant data into the existing Excel micro segments tab as a .csv.

jtlangevin commented 9 years ago

We need to create a JSON file to represent the various micro segments through a nested set of objects. We have discussed various possibilities for how to organize the nesting and have developed the attached image (see red outlined order). The hierarchy generally follows from that of the information included in AEO 2014.

The next step is to actually create the JSON. A first pass will include all the listed categories aside from "Technologies" (the last in the proposed order). This category may prove to be the most challenging due to the many possible types of technologies that could be specified.

json_microsegments-01

trynthink commented 9 years ago

I think the climate zones (CZ in the image) are actually specified as census divisions (CDIVs) in the data from EIA. The scaling occurs in converting CDIVs to CZs, so I don't think we can treat the CZs directly as weights.

Rather more importantly, it seems that getting this structure right is quite important, as measures can't be defined correctly until we have a formalized and complete structure for the markets/microsegments.

jtlangevin commented 9 years ago

This is true. We could create a two tiered climate weighting procedure, where we first apply weights to break the given energy use segment into census divisions, and then weight again to convert the census breakdowns to the necessary climate zone (based on how much square footage from each census division this climate zone represents).

trynthink commented 9 years ago

For robustness, we should probably use regex matching to move data from the AEO data files to the microsegment database. Such an approach should hopefully minimize the number of broken connections and incorrect data assignments between the AEO data and our database.

jtlangevin commented 9 years ago

Agreed.