Scout Core Measures: U.S. Building Energy and Emissions Scenarios to 2050

U.S. building energy use, emissions, and cost projections out to the year 2050, generated by the Scout model from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The dataset underpins a scenario analysis exploring uncertainty in energy demand, supply-side conditions, and the adoption of energy conservation measures. It includes scenarios for different electric power supply futures, three technology adoption packages, and two levels of fuel-switching incentives.

Use Cases

• Comparing building sector CO2 emissions under different electric grid decarbonization scenarios based on AEO projections.
• Assessing the cost implications of adopting performance guideline, best available, or prospective energy conservation measure packages.
• Modeling the impact of fuel-switching incentives on the transition from on-site fossil fuels to electricity.
• Benchmarking long-term energy demand projections for U.S. buildings against other models or policy targets.

Strengths

• Based on Scout, a reproducible and granular model developed by U.S. national labs for the Department of Energy.
• Scenarios are detailed, exploring multiple dimensions: two power supply futures, three technology packages, and two fuel-switching levels.
• One source indicates the dataset is Version 2, updated to use AEO 2019 Reference Case data and Scout version 0.5.1.

Limitations

• Key metadata like row count, column names, and specific file formats are unknown across all sources.
• There is a conflict in the input regarding the AEO reference case year (one source says 2019, another says 2018 for the same scenario code 'RB').
• The 'last updated' field is consistently unknown, making it difficult to assess data freshness.

Provenance

Source

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, using the Scout model for the U.S. Department of Energy's Building Technologies Office.

Collection Method

Modeled scenario analysis using the Scout energy model, which utilizes data from the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO).

Time Range

Projections from a baseline year to 2050.

Geography

United States