This book is about an experiment that we felt ethically and scientifically obligated to conduct. It is a result of finding ourselves in a particular moment in historyâone in which humanity needs to draw upon all of our speciesâ knowledge and capabilities to realize a sustainable future in the coming decades. As academics, we feel it is incumbent upon us to leverage the universityâs unique statusâlegally, ethically, and intellectuallyâin furtherance of urban sustainability and a just energy transition away from fossil fuels. In doing so, we have discovered an immense gap in the practical availability of the data necessary for informing decision-making, including the implementation of Californiaâs ambitious goals for climate action.
Californiaâs efforts to decarbonize electricity generation and to reduce energy use in buildings have resulted in the development of a multitude of ambitious and well-intentioned targets, benchmarks, and policies pursuant to the stateâs overarching sustainability goals. In the course of our research, however, we discovered that a great many of these targets and benchmarks were âdata freeââthat is, there were no data available to guide their implementation or evaluate their success. Nor were there legislative provisions requiring that any particular kind of data be used measure or verify progress in meaningful ways. This was not because a record of building-level energy consumption, among other data, did not existâit is regularly collected by utilities for billing purposesâbut rather because utilities have claimed that such data are proprietary. As we shall explain, these proprietary claims seriously limit the use of granular energy consumption data for public decision-making, and are now proving to be a significant obstacle to the achievement of the stateâs sustainability goals.
In California, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from building stock vary across the state, and by time of day and season, but overall, building energy use accounts for 25% of the stateâs emissions (Mahone et al. 2019). Globally, buildings account for nearly 40% of citiesâ GHG emissions and 40% of their total energy use (International Energy Agency and the United Nations Environment Program 2018). Consequently, knowledge of building energy usage patterns and an understanding of their underlying drivers are fundamental to developing policy strategies for reduction of energy consumption and GHG emissions.
When we first began our work to document energy use in cities, we found ourselves lacking the data needed to inform the energy transition in a scientifically rigorous manner and help enable the implementation of effective public policy. Not only did we university researchers not have the information we needed to pursue our own research questions, but local governmentsâcharged with saving energy for their residentsâcould not even obtain energy data on their own municipal operations from the utilities, let alone building energy consumption data for their populations. As the lack of access had become an increasingly significant obstacle to energy research and policy implementation efforts, we moved to participate in public debates about the rights of different entities to access building energy data. We pushed for, and participated in, a state level regulatory process (described in more depth in subsequent chapters) that eventually gave universities access to building energy consumption data, although extensive challenges still remain to this day. What we present in this book is the outcome of that engagement: the UCLA Energy Atlas.
The UCLA Energy Atlas is a spatial-temporal record of the energy consumed by and within the built environment. The Atlas links energy consumption from utility billing data to tax assessorâs parcels using addresses; making statistical, geographic, and chronological analyses of energy consumption possible. It consists of two parts: a back-end database, and a public facing, interactive web map, and data visualization platform. The back-end database, on which the Energy Atlas website is based, contains hundreds of millions of records of historical consumption at the address level; it enables a wide array of research projects related to decarbonizing building energy use, which in turn serve to inform state and local government policies. The public web map displays building energy use in a multitude of waysâincluding by use type, square footage, and vintage, as well as by socio-demographicsâand is aggregated to protect customer privacy following regulatory rules. The Energy Atlas is regularly updated with new data and spatial attributes as we obtain additional research funding, and as local governments request in-depth analyses.
The UCLA Energy Atlas was born from the need to fill an enormous gap at this pivotal juncture in the climate crisis. It is a product of our commitment as scientists to evidence-based energy policy, and a testament to how crucial such data are for understanding building energy use. This book is a collaborative endeavor, weaving together knowledge and contributions from an interdisciplinary team of researchers who have created, maintained, and expanded its geographical extent and content purview. The Atlas could not have been developed without this interdisciplinary collaboration. We are also grateful to a number of people without whom this work would have never been possible. These include Dave Freeman, former General Manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Howard Choy, former General Manager of Energy and Environmental Services Internal Services Division of Los Angeles County, Mark Gold, former Acting Director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, Amy Reardon of the state Public Utilities Commission, Michael Peevey, former Chair of the state Public Utilities Commission, Ken Alex, former Director of the state Office of Planning and Research, and Eric Stokes, Program Manager at the state Energy Commission who provided us our first round of funding. We cannot thank all the people who have, in one way or another, supported our work, but it is a truism that good work is a collaborative effort, and the Atlas is no different.
About the Chapters
- Chapter 2âPlaces our initiative in the larger context of the rise of big data and data representation, the energy transition, and Californiaâs energy politics.
- Chapter 3âAddresses building energy data access issues in California (found commonly across the country and beyond) and aggregation rules. We describe the process by which address-level building energy use data became available and the political context of that decision. This chapter, as a result, provides a window into the institutional context of electricity and natural gas regulation in the state, its evolution, and current challenges. Regulation of electricity and natural gas utilities is scattered across state agencies, the state legislature and federal agencies and regulators. We shed light on the evolving regulatory regime for the energy utilities that then cascades down to the locality. Limitations to using and displaying disaggregated data are discussed through examining the data aggregation rules and the consequences for research and public display of energy use in the Atlas. The chapter also introduces utility dataâwhat data is maintained by the utilities and how researchers have developed processing methods to make the data usable. We also explain our geocoding process for the data, how spatial matches are enabled that allow correlating energy use to buildings and people and other attributes of the region, such as solar capacity of rooftops, environmental quality, temperature, or microclimate.
- Chapter 4âDescribes how the Atlas was built: the constituent data layers and their characteristics; the data processing steps and methodology for linking the data layers together; the approach to maintaining security and privacy; and the inherent limitations and challenges of working with these data.
- Chapter 5âDiscusses the mapping process itself and the making of the interactive Atlas website. Interactive websites must be both functional and beautiful to attract users. They must provide sufficient important data, but in user-friendly, intuitive ways that engage the user because the presentation of data is well thought through. We discuss the selection of the covariate dataâpartly a function of what is publicly available and what seemed to the researchersâintegrating stakeholder suggestionsâto be revelatory about building energy use for equity analysis and the implementation of renewable energy resources. This approach is guided by an intent to provide information to support a just energy transition, and to assist local government reporting and program implementation. We also discuss the websiteâs architectureâthe software utilized, and the reasons for its selection. Finally, we detail database protocols that maintain the security and confidentiality of the data.
- Chapter 6âDelves into data analytics. âBig dataâ may be defined by its size, complexity, and the speed at which additional data is generated. For big data to be useful, its potential to explain phenomena and provide insights must be well understood. We explain our approach to extracting information from the âbigâ data stored in the Energy Atlas. We also discuss analytics driven by requests for information from stakeholders and/or communities, as well as those which support specific research grants. The examples presented aim to demonstrate the enormous potential inherent with the type, size, and extent of data in the Atlas.
- Chapter 7âPresents a series of case studies made possible by the Energy Atlas database, including a number of grant-funded research projects that used the granular data for cutting-edge analysis without compromising customer privacy. We utilized a hub and spoke approach to the work: the data is the hub, and we have built specific analytics, many spokes, as a result of additional funding. We hope that these projects a...