PNNL

Abstract

Improving the energy efficiency of the building stock, commercial equipment and household appliances can have a major impact on energy use, carbon emissions, and building services. Subnational regions such as U.S. states wish to increase their energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions or adapt to climate change. Evaluating subnational policies to reduce energy use and emissions is difficult because of the uncertainties in socioeconomic factors, technology performance and cost, and energy and climate policies. Climate change may undercut such policies. Assessing these uncertainties can be a significant modeling and computation burden. As part of this uncertainty assessment, this paper demonstrates how a decision-focused sensitivity analysis strategy using fractional factorial methods can be applied to reveal the important drivers for detailed uncertainty analysis.