Author(s): Becka Brolinson, Jessica Shui, and November Wilson
Abstract: We estimate residential energy use and CO2 emissions for single-family homes using administrative data from approximately 45 million property appraisals, or 1.8 billion property-month observations. First, we find that from 2013 to 2021, CO2 emissions decreased by 8.8 percent in aggregate while single-family housing stock increased by 7.3 percent at the same time, suggesting decreasing carbon intensity of single-family homes. Emissions from electricity use decreased by 13.6 percent, while emissions from natural gas use for home heating increased by 3.6 percent. Second, we estimate that the majority of the decline in CO2 emissions from properties in our sample can be attributed to changes in US electricity generation, rather than changes over time to property-level characteristics or growth in US housing stock. Third, we show that aggregate emissions estimates from the property-level data closely align with aggregate emissions estimates using publicly available state-level data in 2020 and 2021, providing validation of our approach using property-level data and demonstrating that for aggregate estimates, state-level data is sufficient.