Developing a Building-by-Building Estimate of City-wide Electricity Savings Potential: An Early Trial for the City of Wilmington, Delaware

The research outputs of the 2020-2021 “Wilmington as a Savings City” project, conducted jointly by the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy (CEEP) and the Foundation for Renewable Energy and Environment (FREE), provide a methodological framework that can be directly relevant to the City of Wilmington and other cities in Delaware. Using high-resolution and comprehensive data, the research effort pursues a detailed inventory of the Wilmington building stock with which we estimate building-level electricity consumption and possible energy-saving opportunities. As the title of this report indicates, we apply an early trial of the methodological framework that we have developed for the purposes of describing how a new analysis might better serve the purpose of estimating ‘savings city’ potential. We call it an ‘early trial’ to underscore that the model described and applied in this report is part of an ongoing development process. The methodological framework will be refined in order to have practical value to urban planning. The results illustrated in this report should, therefore, be seen as an assessment of the overall value of the methodological framework brings to the table and not firm estimates to be used in planning. Currently, methods to estimate building energy savings potential for a city relies on technology potential for ‘typical buildings’. As discussed below, our team is investigating a method that uses all buildings in a city and is sensitive to the range of differences in building stocks from one city to the next. The promise of this approach is that it can offer estimates derived from actual city building inventories, not ‘typical’ building stocks. The accuracy of estimates produced by this method should be greater and more useful to cities. We recommend its use by the reader to gain familiarity with the tool and its potential.