20c HOME ENERGY SCORE INTEGRATION TIME-OF-USE RATES FOR UTILITY PROGRAM IMPLEMENTATION

The Nation’s transition towards renewable energy is creating the need for homes to vary their energy use across the hours of the day, and become responsive to that dynamic supply of renewable sources. Time-of-use rate structures have been developed by utilities and utility commissions as a strategy to incent home occupants to adjust their energy use patterns with supply. Nationally, approximately half of investor-owned-utilities utilize time-of-use rate structures. The Home Energy Score™ tool is currently capable of reporting energy savings on an annual basis, however its underlying model calculates energy use at hourly intervals. Enabling the Home Energy Score™ to efficiently integrate individual time-of-use rate structures and time-of-use responsive efficiency measures will result in more impactful home energy performance decisions by utilities, builders, contractors, financers and occupants/owners. Proposed is development of a new time-of-use energy cost database platform which will communicate with the existing Home Energy Score™ platform and other industry software platforms. The additional calculus of time-of-use data dramatically increases computational power required for an already intensive process. The new platform will process this data more efficiently using a representative data set to provide near-instantaneous results to users, enabling live user interaction and evaluation of multiple scenarios. During the feasibility period, a beta version of the tool will be developed to pilot its functionality along with utility partners and municipal partners that already utilize the Home Energy Score™ tool. Development of the proposed software will serve to expand the user base of the Home Energy Score™ tool, and enable more effective and accurate use for the growing proportion of time-ofuse rate structures across the United States.