Short Answer: Yes, about 2% of RECS end-use annual energy use was determined to be out
of “reasonable” bounds and adjusted to be within a standard error-based limit.
Longer Answer: A small number of RECS end use energy use estimates
are judged to be out of reasonable bounds. For example, the maximum RECS water heating
kWh estimate was 25,824 which reflects more than 9 times the average of 2,808 kWh.
The RECS end-use estimation process uses a variance-based calibration adjustment
to calibrate its end-use estimates. In short, this process estimates end use energy
within the household with statistical and engineering data and then adjusts the
difference between the whole building kWh estimate and energy supplier kWh data
based on variations observed for different end uses. This process can sometimes
exaggerate adjustments to wide-variance end-use estimates based on household
characteristics. The MAISY Recs Database development process scans for these
out-of-bound estimates and provides a correction, removing excessive end-use estimate
kWh and allocating it to the “other” category. A small number of households have
other or whole building annual kWh that identifies them as out of bounds as well.
These households, which reflect less than 0.1% of all buildings, are removed from the
MAISY RECS Database household sample.
|