End-usemodelmethodologyFAQs-End-UseModelsFAQs.PDFVIP

February 2013 Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) End-Use Models FAQs What is an end-use model? An end-use model is a set of equations designed to disaggregate a RECS sample household’s total annual fuel consumption into end uses such as space heating, air conditioning, water heating, refrigeration, and so on. These disaggregated values are then weighted up to produce population estimates of total and average energy end uses at various levels of geography, by housing unit type, or other tabulations of interest. Why are end-use models needed? Information regarding how total energy is distributed across various end uses is critical to meeting future energy demand and improving efficiency and building design. Using submeters to measure exact end-use consumption within each sample household is the ideal way to obtain this information. However, it is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to implement. Instead, EIA uses a statistical model to decompose total energy consumption into end-use components. How many end-use models does RECS have? RECS has five separate, independently-fitted end-use models, one for each of the main fuels: electricity, natural gas, propane, fuel oil, and kerosene. What is the general structure of the end-use models? The general model structure specifies total consumption to be a sum of terms, where each term represents an end-use component. Each end-use component, in turn, is composed of model parameters (unknown, to be estimated) and independent (known) variables. By estimating the U.S. Energy Information Administration | Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) End-Use Models FAQs 1 model parameters, the end-use components can be individually calculated, yielding the desired disaggregation of total fuel consumption by end us