Office equipment energy use and trends

Abstract

Office information technologies are using an increasing amount of energy in commercial buildings. During recent forecasting hearings in California, the office equipment end use has been a major source of differences among forecasts of commercial sector energy use. Not only are there major differences in forecasted load growth resulting from the energy use of office equipment, but there are also differences in interpretations of historical and base-year estimates. Understanding office equipment energy use is particularly important because office equipment is widely believed to be the fastest growing electrical end use in the fastest growing sector. This report describes the development and application of a spreadsheet to estimate current and future energy use by office equipment. We define the term ``office equipment`` to mean information processing technologies used in buildings. The seven categories of office equipment relate to categories found in our analysis of utility surveys and industry sales reports. These seven categories of equipment are examined for eleven types of commercial buildings.