Load Shape Planning Tool Development

California’s transition from legacy impact profiles to consumption load shapes is a critical step in improving the valuation of deemed energy efficiency measures for the 2028 program cycle. As avoided costs become increasingly time dependent and load flexibility becomes more important to portfolio performance, the timing of energy consumption and savings has a larger influence on Total System Benefit and cost effectiveness results. This project addressed a key implementation question for statewide measure development: what level of consumption load shape granularity is justified, and when can load shapes be consolidated without materially reducing analytical value? The project developed and applied a repeatable framework for creating, comparing, and coalescing electric consumption load shapes across 10 representative deemed measure packages. These measure packages spanned five major load shape categories: cooling only, heating and cooling, fuel substitution, water heating, and continuous loads. The analysis used modeled EnergyPlus outputs where available, supplemented by non-modeled data sources where appropriate, and integrated avoided costs to compare load shape value across building location, building type, base case variation, and measure case variation. The results show that substantial reductions in the number of consumption load shapes are possible while maintaining relatively low variation in unitized electric benefit. For some modeled HVAC measure packages, individual curves can be reduced from approximately 18,000 to 336 through building type and location grouping, and further reduced to 16 grouped curves with only modest increases in average standard deviation. Across the analyzed measures, coalescing reduced load shape volume by orders of magnitude while generally keeping average standard deviation near or below 6 percent. Overall, the findings demonstrate that structured load shape coalescing can improve implementation practicality while preserving meaningful cost effectiveness precision for California’s statewide energy efficiency tools.