The rapidly growing world energy use has already raised concerns over supply difficulties, exhaustion of energy resources and heavy environmental impacts (ozone layer depletion, global warming, climate change, etc.). The global contribution from buildings towards energy consumption, both residential and commercial, has steadily increased reaching figures between 20% and 40% in developed countries, and has exceeded the other major sectors: industrial and transportation. Growth in population, increasing demand for building services and comfort levels, together with the rise in time spent inside buildings, assure the upward trend in energy demand will continue in the future (4).
The residential sector in the United States of America consumed about 21% if the total primary energy consumption (3). In 2015 alone the residential sector used 20869 Trillion BTUs of primary energy. According to EIA the average energy consumption of a home in United States is decreasing. The homes are becoming larger and still consuming less energy. Having said that, the total energy consumption of the residential has been almost unchanged. In order to address this ambiguity, the RECS data set was considered for analysis. The RECS data set is a dataset which represents the US population and its characteristics related to energy consumption fairy well, as its samples represent the population.
This analysis includes some general trends in the characteristics like variation in consumption of energy as the year in which a housing unit was built changes, variation in energy consumption patterns with respect to where a housing unit is located and the change in the average square footage of housing units with time. It also includes a time series analysis of number of housing units built each year and uses the time series model to forecast the trend in housing units to 2040. Moreover, it also includes a regression analysis to model the total energy used for space heating.