The Industry Energy Tool (IET): Documentation

Studies of industrial energy use typically mention the sector's heterogeneity and complexity as modelling barriers. One of the more significant impediments to analyzing and building models of U.S. industrial energy use is the lack of current, disaggregated data. The Industry Energy Tool (IET) and its foundational data addresses some of these barriers. The IET uses county-level energy data with stock turnover, energy efficiency, fuel switching, and emissions functionalities to calculate energy use and emissions from agriculture, construction, mining, and manufacturing industries from 2014 to 2050. The IET is an open-source, transparent, and flexible tool for exploring industrial sector energy and emissions scenarios. The IET takes a simplified approach to developing scenario projections of energy and emissions by allowing users to modify pre-populated inputs for achieved energy efficiency, rate of equipment stock turnover, and future penetration renewable electricity. In addition to its transparency and flexibility, the strengths of the IET lie in its geographically- and operationally-disaggregated data set. The IET's foundational data is built on energy data first calculated at the facility- and technology-level for many of the largest energy-using industries. These data are then aggregated to the county and end-use level with other publicly-available data for use in scenarios estimated by the IET.