How Managing Building Energy Demand Can Aid the Clean Energy Transition

New Berkeley Lab study finds that more energy efficient and flexible buildings could be a substantial resource for the electric grid. Since buildings consume 75% of electricity in the U.S., they offer great potential for saving energy and reducing the demands on our rapidly changing electric grid. But how much, where, and through which strategies could better management of building energy use actually impact the electricity system? A comprehensive new study led by researchers from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ÜBerkeley Lab) answers these questions, quantifying what can be done to make buildings more energy efficient and flexible in granular detail by both time (including time of day and year) and space (looking at regions across the U.S. The research team, which also included scientists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), found that maximizing the deployment of building demand management technologies could avoid the need for up to one-third of coalor gas-fired power generation and would mean that at least half of all such power plants that are expected to be brought online between now and 2050 would not need to be built. Their findings were published recently in the journal Joule. Deploying certain technologies to manage energy demand in buildings has the potential to avoid the need for up to one-third of coalor gas-fired power generation, according to a new study led by Berkeley Lab.