Forecasting Residential Heating and Electricity Demand with Scalable, High-Resolution, Open-Source Models

Electrifying space and water heating is a critical priority for the energy transition. The necessary widespread adoption of heat pumps will have significant impacts on the power grid. Studies report heating electrification may increase winter peak electricity demand by up to 70%, with some colder regions experiencing a more than fourfold increase in peak demand. The process of upgrading the grid has a critical spatial dimension, as heating demand, electricity demand, and the capacity of existing grid infrastructure vary significantly across regions. Grid planning also involves a critical temporal dimension: short-term weather patterns and long-term climate change introduce complexities and uncertainties that can be di fficult to quantify. However, most existing demand forecasts are provided and validated only at aggregated spatial scales, lack temporal detail, and provide single-valued predictions. Without accurate, probabilistic, and spatially and temporally resolved demand forecasts, planners risk misallocating scarce resources. We present a novel framework for high-resolution forecasting of residential heating and electricity demand using probabilistic deep learning models. We focus specifically on providing hourly building-level electricity and heating demand forecasts for the residential sector. Leveraging multimodal building-level information - including data on building footprint areas, heights, nearby building density, nearby building size, land use patterns, and high-resolution weather data - and probabilistic modeling, our methods provide granular insights into demand heterogeneity. V alida-tion at the building level underscores a step change improvement in performance relative to NREL's ResStock model, which has emerged as a research community standard for residential heating and electricity demand characterization. In building-level heating and electricity estimation backtests, our probabilistic models respectively achieve RMSE scores 18.3% and 35.1% lower than those based on ResStock. Introduction Electrifying space and water heating is a critical priority for the energy transition [1, 2]. Residential and commercial buildings make up 13% of all U.S. emissions [3], with fossil-fueled space heating representing the single greatest constituent of this share [4]. The necessary widespread adoption of heat pumps will have significant impacts on the power grid.