This report documents a project undertaken for the California Urban Water Conservation Council (the Council) to create a new method of accounting for the diverse environmental benefits of raw water savings. The environmental benefits (EB) model was designed to provide water utilities with a practical tool that they can use to assign a monetary value to the benefits that may accrue from implementing any of the Council-recommended Best Management Practices. The model treats only environmental services associated directly with water, and is intended to cover miscellaneous impacts that are not currently accounted for in any other cost-benefit analysis.

This paper presents the results of a survey and analysis of electricity tariffs and marginal electricity prices for commercial buildings. The tariff data come from a survey of 90 utilities and 250 tariffs for non-residential customers collected in 2004 as part of the Tariff Analysis Project at LBNL. The goals of this analysis are to provide useful summary data on the marginal electricity prices commercial customers actually see, and insight into the factors that are most important in determining prices under different circumstances. We provide a new, empirically-based definition of several marginal prices: the effective marginal price and energy-only and demand-only prices, and derive a simple formula that expresses the dependence of the effective marginal price on the marginal load factor. The latter is a variable that can be used to characterize the load impacts of a particular end-use or efficiency measure. We calculate all these prices for eleven regions within the continental U.S.

The Home Energy Saver (HES, http://HomeEnergySaver.lbl.gov) is an interactive web site designed to help residential consumers make decisions about energy use in their homes. This report describes the underlying methods and data for estimating energy consumption. Using engineering models, the site estimates energy consumption for six major categories (end uses); heating, cooling, water heating, major appliances, lighting, and miscellaneous equipment. The approach taken by the Home Energy Saver is to provide users with initial results based on a minimum of user input, allowing progressively greater control in specifying the characteristics of the house and energy consuming appliances. Outputs include energy consumption (by fuel and end use), energy-related emissions (carbon dioxide), energy bills (total and by fuel and end use), and energy saving recommendations. Real-world electricity tariffs are used for many locations, making the bill estimates even more accurate. Where information about the house is not available from the user, default values are used based on end-use surveys and engineering studies. An extensive body of qualitative decision-support information augments the analytical results.