Climate induced extreme weather events and weather variations will affect both energy demand and energy supply system resilience. The specific potential impact of extreme events on energy systems has been difficult to quantify due to the unpredictability of future weather events. Here we develop a stochastic-robust optimization method to consider both low impact variations and extreme events. Applications of the method to 30 cities in Sweden, by considering 13 climate change scenarios, reveal that uncertainties in renewable energy potential and demand can lead to a significant performance gap (up to 34% for grid integration) brought by future climate variations and a drop in power supply reliability (up to 16%) due to extreme weather events. Appropriate quantification of the climate change impacts will ensure robust operation of the energy systems and enable renewable energy penetration above 30% for a majority of the cities. 2According to the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, 1 climate change will most likely accelerate, causing increasingly frequent and strong extreme climate events that make humans, as well as built and natural systems, more vulnerable to those events. Failure to address climate change mitigation and adaptation could lead to disaster and serious short-and long-term issues, 2 including partial or total blackouts due to energy supply disruptions. 3 These consequences could be very costly to cities and urban areas. Currently, 3.5 billion people live in these areas, consuming two-thirds of global primary energy and producing 71% of the directly energy-related global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. By 2050, urban areas are expected to hold more than half of the world's population, which will multiply the costs and impacts. 4 Therefore, the urban sector plays an important role in both climate change adaptation and mitigation. Conserving energy and using renewable energy technologies in these areas will be essential to minimize the carbon footprint of the energy infrastructure. Distributed energy systems that support the integration of renewable energy technologies will support the energy transition in the urban context 5 and play a vital role in climate change mitigation and adaptation.Climate change affects the energy use of urban areas extensively, by influencing energy demand, generation, systems and infrastructure. 6,7 Renewable energy generation can be affected in various ways, too, depending on the renewable source (e.g., wind, hydropower or solar) 8,9 and geographical location. 10 Due to extreme weather events, impacts of climate change on peak electricity demand will reach well beyond simple changes in net annual demand and become more critical due to their influence on system design and power supply. 11,12 For example, Sweden's existing residential building stock may experience an approximate 30% decrease in 20-year average heating demand during 2081-2100 compared to 1991-2010, while during extreme conditions the hourly heating and cooling demand may reach betwe...

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Building more energy-efficient and sustainable urban areas that will both mitigate the effects of climate change and anticipate living conditions in future climate scenarios requires the development of new tools and methods that can help urban planners, architects and communities achieve this goal. In the current study, we designed a workflow that links different methodologies developed separately, to derive the energy consumption of a university school campus for the future. Three different scenarios for typical future years (2039, 2069, 2099) were run, as well as a renovation scenario (Minergie-P). We analyzed the impact of climate change on the heating and cooling demand of buildings and determined the relevance of taking into account the local climate in this particular context. The results from the simulations confirmed that in the future, there will be a constant decrease in the heating demand, while the cooling demand will substantially increase. Significantly, it was further demonstrated that when the local urban climate was taken into account, there was an even higher rise in the cooling demand, but also that a set of proposed Minergie-P renovations were not sufficient to achieve resilient buildings. We discuss the implication of this work for the simulation of building energy consumption at the neighborhood scale and the impact of future local climate on energy system design. We finally give a few perspectives regarding improved urban design and possible pathways for future urban areas.

No abstract