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SB's avatar

Europe is even more diverse than US. It includes everything from passive houses to brutalist and khrushchyovka-style blocks of flats made in the 60 and 70 out of plain concrete and no insulation, some dependent of large-scale waste heat from nearby industry.

Houses also tend to have higher thermal mass and require less air conditioning - because of their geographic location, a simple day/night average is suficient to keep most homes most of the year free from heat, with the other side of the coin being increased heating requirements during winter.

Another large difference is the amount of non-heating electricity used. Until the move to induction technology in the last decade, electric cookstoves tended to be rare and most people preferred gas appliances. Classical, resistive tumble driers are almost unheard of and unavailable for purchase. It's quite shocking to see that newer homes in the US use more domestic electric energy than the combined requirements for heating and hot water preparation.

From what I understand, the normal electric hookup in the US is 2x120V, 100A (24KW), there is a move to 200Amps and older homes tend to have 50 Amps lines. This is 50%-100% more that what the equivalent house in Europe would have - many apartments are served by a single 32A/230V line (7KW).

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Eric Wilson's avatar

Hi Brian, thanks for highlighting our work! Could you let me know more about the double-counting issue you're seeing (contact info: https://www.nrel.gov/research/staff/eric-wilson.html)?

Re: messy data, the sample size can get low for some of the rows (you can see the sample count if you hover over each data point; anything less than 100 samples will have higher uncertainty). In future iterations, we hope to better convey the uncertainty graphically.

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