BuildStock

NLR has created BuildStock, a free public resource of current and possible modeled energy use in buildings across the United States.

BuildStock represents the U.S. building stock through highly granular datasets that combine multiple data sources, statistical sampling, and detailed building energy simulations. Users can easily access datasets through a web data viewer, online interactive dashboards, or a centralized storage repository.

With more than 7,500 unique users, BuildStock is leveraged across all 50 states and territories, including local government and state energy offices, manufacturers, energy system operators or developers, and venture capital and financial institutions.

Applications

BuildStock tools, data, and publications can be used by:

• Utilities to inform decisions around their internal planning processes, helping them to better understand the potential impact of energy programs detailed to specific customer segments
• Cities to identify potential cost saving and grid flexibility opportunities by providing information about building energy use patterns and trends
• States to understand the possible energy impact of specific energy efficiency policies
• Manufacturers to inform decisions surrounding the design of energy-efficient products and services and better understand the potential for different product offerings in a market
• Building owners to evaluate the energy efficiency of commercial and residential building portfolios
• Banks, venture capital, and financial institutions to perform due diligence on investment or financing transactions
• Academia and research institutions to drive innovation by enabling high-resolution analyses, providing inputs for experiments, and supplying training data for advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence applications.

ComStock and ResStock

ComStock™ (for commercial buildings) and ResStock™ (for residential buildings) provide insight into energy use across the U.S. building stock today that can be used to evaluate scenarios for tomorrow. The modeling tools combine diverse datasets with statistical sampling and detailed simulations to deliver accurate datasets at multiple geographic scales and timeframes.

Using more than 550,000 models, ComStock and ResStock represent the variety of U.S. buildings, are calibrated to realistically represent hourly consumption, and are released at 15-minute resolution by end use (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning; lighting; water heating; appliances; miscellaneous loads). Powered by NLR's high-performance computing, regularly released datasets provide a foundation for developing actionable insights. This allows utilities, cities, states, manufacturers, and building owners to assess how different technologies and upgrade measures could improve energy patterns and uncover potential utility bill savings.

End-Use Load Profiles

ComStock and ResStock data are regularly released to a central database, continually improving baseline energy modeling and adding new technologies to the datasets. These datasets provide end-use load profiles for major building types, end uses, and climate regions across the United States, helping stakeholders understand the time-sensitive impacts of energy efficiency, demand response, and other distributed energy resources.

At the most fundamental level, the end-use load profile dataset is the output of over 550,000 building energy models. Each building energy model represents 1 year of energy consumption in 15-minute intervals, separated into end-use categories.

NLR partnered with more than 40 organizations to gain access to building and energy usage data for specific building types, such as residential homes, multifamily housing units, schools, and businesses. The verified information allows the research team to further refine building characteristics and load profiles.

Information about the model improvements incorporated into each data release can be found on the ResStock and ComStock GitHub repositories.

Publications

Highly Resolved Reference Projections of Building Energy Use for the Contiguous United States: Building Sector Energy Baselines, Projection Methods, and Results, NLR Technical Report (2025)

Leveraging NLR’s ResStock and ComStock Dataset to Evaluate Building Stock Electrification, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2024)

End Use Load Profiles for the U.S. Building Stock, NLR Presentation (2019)

News

NREL Explores Path To Increase Occupant Safety During Extreme Weather, NLR News (2024)

NREL Researchers Reveal How Buildings Across United States Do—and Could—Use Energy, NLR News (2023)

Statewide Residential Building Upgrade Planning Just Got Easier Thanks to New Dashboard, NLR News (2023)

Contact

Email the research team at [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected] for more information.