“The Better Building’s Clean Energy for Low Income Communities Accelerator (CELICA) was launched in 2016 to help state and local partners across the nation meet their goals for increasing uptake of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies in low and moderate income communities. As a part of the Accelerator, DOE created this Low-Income Energy Affordability Data (LEAD) Tool to assist partners with understanding their LMI community characteristics. This can be utilized for low income and moderate income energy policy and program planning, as it provides interactive state, county and city level worksheets with graphs and data including number of households at different income levels and numbers of homeowners versus renters. It provides a breakdown based on fuel type, building type, and construction year. It also provides average monthly energy expenditures and energy burden (percentage of income spent on energy).
HOW TO USE:
The LEAD tool can be used to support program design and goal setting, and they can be paired with other data to improve LMI community energy benchmarking and program evaluation. Datasets are available for all 50 states, census divisions, and tract levels. You will have to enable macros in MS Excel to interact with the data. A description of each of the files and what states are included in each U.S. Census Division can be found in the file “DESCRIPTION OF FILES”.”
Click here to view the tool