Residential Customer Equivalent (RCE) is a unit of measures used by the
energy industry
The energy industry is the totality of all of the industries involved in the production and sale of energy, including fuel extraction, manufacturing, refining and distribution. Modern society consumes large amounts of fuel, and the energy industr ...
to denote the typical annual commodity consumption by a single-family residential customer.
Also known as "RCE" for short, a single RCE represents 1,000
therm
The therm (symbol, thm) is a non- SI unit of heat energy equal to 100,000 British thermal units (BTU), and approximately megajoules, kilowatt-hours, kilocalories and thermies. One therm is the energy content of approximately of natural gas at s ...
s of
natural gas
Natural gas (also called fossil gas or simply gas) is a naturally occurring mixture of gaseous hydrocarbons consisting primarily of methane in addition to various smaller amounts of other higher alkanes. Low levels of trace gases like carbon ...
or 10,000
kWh
A kilowatt-hour ( unit symbol: kW⋅h or kW h; commonly written as kWh) is a unit of energy: one kilowatt of power for one hour. In terms of SI derived units with special names, it equals 3.6 megajoules (MJ). Kilowatt-hours are a common bi ...
of
electricity
Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as describ ...
.
RCE is often used to help normalize the size of energy companies. Energy companies serve a number of customers that is typically different from the RCE value consumed by those customers. For example, an
LDC or
ESCO may serve 50,000 customers but many of those can be commercial or industrial customers, so that same company can be said to serve 400,000 RCE.
References
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Energy economics
Equivalent units