Using utility data to plan building electrification

Electrifying a building, swapping gas heating for heat pumps and moving other end uses to electricity, is one of the largest decisions a building owner makes. It also runs entirely on data you already have. Your gas and electricity bills, your interval data and your peak demand describe exactly how the building uses energy today, and that record is what tells you whether a switch will be smooth or expensive.

This guide walks through the utility-data questions that decide an electrification plan: how much heating you actually buy, what the new electric load looks like, whether the service can carry it, and how the bill changes.

Why this matters now

The direction is set by the market as much as by policy. In recent years heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces in the United States, buying about 21 percent more heat pumps than gas furnaces in one recent year. Buildings are also where the energy is: residential and commercial buildings together account for roughly 40 percent of US energy use, and in commercial buildings space heating is the largest single end use. Heating is both the biggest target and the hardest to switch, which is exactly why the plan has to start from measured data.

Step 1: Establish the real heating baseline

The foundation of any electrification plan is an honest picture of current fuel use. Pull at least a full year, ideally several, of gas and electricity bills and separate what is weather-driven from what is not. Gas consumption that rises in winter is your space-heating load, and that is the quantity a heat pump has to replace.

This is where clean data earns its keep. Billing periods that straddle months, estimated reads and unit inconsistencies all distort the seasonal pattern, and a distorted baseline sizes the new system wrong. Weather-normalizing the history separates a genuinely high heating load from an unusually cold year, so the design is built on typical conditions rather than one bad winter.

Step 2: Model the new electric load

Heat pumps do not convert gas demand into electric demand one for one, because they move heat rather than burn fuel. A unit with a coefficient of performance of 3 delivers about three units of heat per unit of electricity, and modern air-source heat pumps run roughly 2 to 4 times more efficient than electric resistance heating. That efficiency is why the added electricity is far less than the gas it replaces on an energy basis.

The catch is that efficiency falls as it gets colder. Cold-climate models hold up well, maintaining a coefficient of performance above 1.5 even around minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit, but the coldest hours are when electric demand peaks and the heating need is highest at once. Your interval data shows when those hours fall, and that is what sizes the system and predicts the new winter peak.

Step 3: Check whether the service can carry it

Adding electric heating raises the peak the building draws, and the electrical service has to be able to supply it. Service capacity is a real constraint, not a formality: in the residential stock, roughly 31 percent of homes have electrical panels rated at 100 amps or less, which can limit new electric loads without an upgrade, and the same capacity question applies to commercial buildings at larger scale. The U.S. Department of Energy now treats electrical panel and service constraints as a central barrier to electrification.

Your peak demand history is the input that answers this. It tells you the existing peak, and modeling the added heating load on top tells you whether the new peak stays inside the service rating or triggers a costly upgrade. Reading the peaks accurately can be the difference between a straightforward retrofit and a service that has to be rebuilt.

Step 4: Model the bill, not just the energy

Electrification changes what you pay for as well as how much energy you use. Gas volume charges disappear, electricity rises, and for accounts with demand charges the new winter peak can carry a cost that pure energy math misses entirely. A plan that compares gas therms to electric kilowatt-hours without accounting for demand charges and rate structure can misjudge the operating economics.

1. Separate weather-driven heating gas from baseline gas use
2. Convert the heating load to added electricity using realistic seasonal efficiency
3. Add that load to the existing electric profile to find the new peak
4. Check the new peak against the electrical service capacity
5. Reprice the whole load under the electric tariff, including demand charges

Clean data is the prerequisite

Every step here depends on trustworthy history. Estimated reads, mismatched units, split billing periods and gaps quietly distort the heating baseline, the peak analysis and the bill model, and a plan built on distorted inputs sizes equipment wrong and misjudges the payback. MartinAI reads years of gas and electricity bills and meter data, reconciles and weather-normalizes the history, and produces the clean, comparable baseline an electrification plan is built on. For choosing which buildings to switch first, see our guide on which buildings to retrofit first.