Energy Baseline - Energy Consumption Model
Shepherd Advisors can estimate an energy baseline, broken out by sector and types of energy use within sectors, for your community's planning and development of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy
In order to effectively choose which energy efficiency and conservation activities to focus on, you should have a solid understanding of how and where energy is currently being used in your specific community.
The Energy Consumption Model (ECM), can be individually customized for your community, based on existing demographic and census data, combined with industry standards of energy use in each sector.
For example, in the pie chart below, a sample community’s energy consumption is first divided into Residential, Commercial, Industrial, Municipal and School consumption.
Energy consumption can then be broken down into further detail within sectors. For example, the sample community's commercial sector consumption is broken down as follows:
Finally, for all sectors, including residential and industrial, consumption can be further divided by end use. The example below focuses on the commercial, food service sector:
This data helps to put community energy consumption into perspective, and allows you to identify areas of energy savings opportunities.
For example, some municipalities that we have spoken with have been concentrating their efforts on municipal projects. However, as you can see from the graph above, Municipal consumption only accounts for 6% of the energy consumption in our sample community. Therefore, program efforts aimed at residential, industrial or commercial sectors might have bigger overall effects on reducing the energy use.
In addition to the ECM, Shepherd Advisors can match the energy usage patterns up against published best practices for reducing energy use in that area.
Shepherd Advisors is now conducting this analysis for communities, in preparation for the development of their Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy. The ECM analysis is showing communities where energy use is highest, and empowering them to think through goals, objectives, and actions for addressing some of the highest energy uses in the community.
To learn more about how we can apply this model to your community, and to get a cost quote for use in your EECBG and/or EECS application, please contact Shanna Draheim or Ramsey Zimmerman.
