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The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for Energy Performance Standards for New Buildings presented life-cycle-cost based energy budgets for single-family detached residences. These energy budgets varied with regional climatic conditions but were all based on projections of national average prices for gas, oil and electricity. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking indicated that further analysis of the appropriateness of various price measures for use in setting the Standards was under way. This part of that ongoing analysis addresses the availability of fuel price projections, the variation in fuel prices and escalation rates across the US and the effects of aggregating city price data to the state, Region, or national level. The study only provides a portion of the information required to identify the best price aggregation level for developing of the standards. The research addresses some of the economic efficiency considerations necessary for design of a standard that affects heterogeneous regions. The first section discusses the effects of price variation among and within regions on the efficiency of resource allocation when a standard is imposed. Some evidence of the extreme variability in fuel prices across the US is presented. In the second section, time series, cross-sectional fuel price data are statistically analyzedmore » to determine the similarity in mean fuel prices and price escalation rates when the data are treated at increasing levels of aggregation. The findings of this analysis are reported in the third section, while the appendices contain price distributions details. The last section reports the availability of price projections and discusses some EIA projections compared with actual prices.« less |
