Differential effects of climate change on average and peak demand for heating and cooling across the contiguous United States

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-01048-1. This is version 2 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Yash Vijay Amonkar , James Doss-Gollin , David J Farnham , Upmanu Lall , Vijay Modi 

Abstract

While most electricity systems are designed to handle peak demand during summer months, pathways to deep decarbonization generally electrify building heating, thus increasing electricity demand during winter. A key question is how climate variability and change will affect peak heating and cooling demand in an electrified future. We conduct a spatially explicit analysis of trends in temperature-based proxies of electricity demand over the past 70 years. Average annual demand for heating (cooling) decreases (increases) over most of the contiguous US. However, while climate change drives robust increases in peak cooling demand, trends in peak heating demand are generally smaller and less robust. Because the distribution of temperature exhibits a long left tail, severe cold snaps dominate the extremes of thermal demand. As building heating electrifies, system operators must account for these events to ensure reliability.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31223/X5TH5X

Subjects

Engineering

Keywords

Dates

Published: 2023-07-07 01:46

Last Updated: 2024-06-24 05:38

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License

CC BY Attribution 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Conflict of interest statement:
None

Data Availability (Reason not available):
All code used in this study is made publicly available in a GitHub repository and can be accessed from https://github.com/yashamonkar/CONUS-Inferred-Heating-Cooling