Utility Sector Impacts of Reduced Electricity Demand: Updates to Methodology and Results

This report presents revisions to the methodology for estimating the utility sector impacts associated with electricity demand reductions, rst published in our 2014 study. The earlier report described how to calculate utility impact factors based on data from the Energy Information Agency's Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) projections of electricity supply and demand. The 2014 methodology relied on data from the AEO Reference case, and side cases implementing demand-side policies with a substantial impact on total demand. Beginning in 2015, the AEO publication schedule was revised to limit the number of side cases published with each AEO, and no suitable demand-focused side cases have been released since 2014. Hence, this paper presents a generalization of the methodology that allows a uniform approach irrespective of the nature of the side cases published with the AEO.

The impact factors we calculate represent coecients of variation between a unit reduction to site electricity demand and corresponding supply-side changes, including reductions to electric power generation and primary fuel consumption by fuel type, emissions of criteria pollutants (Hg, NO_x and SO₂) and greenhouse gases (CO₂, N₂O and CH₄), and total installed capacity by plant type. The impact factors are time-dependent, and also depend on the demand sector and end use. In this report, we apply the methodology to all AEO publications from 2014-2019, and all scenarios. We quantify the variation in factors across dierent side cases within each AEO, and across dierent AEO publications, and compare this to the variation due to changes in methodology.