Effects of climate and potential policy changes on heating degree days in current heating areas of China

Abstract

Based on climate simulations over East Asia from a high-resolution regional climate model under RCP4.5 and 8.5 scenarios, we examine the impact of future climate change and heating policy changes on energy demand in current central heating areas over China using the heating degree days (HDD) and the number of the heating days (NHD) with different base temperature as the indices. Based on current heating policy in China, significant decreases of NHDs are projected, with larger decreases under RCP8.5 than RCP4.5. This decrease of NHDs would cause a northward shift of the decadal heating boundary line, with significant implications for infrastructure planning and development. Changing the heating policy currently in practice to one used in Europe and USA would cause an immediate jump in NHDs and in HDDs; as warming progresses in the future, these effects attenuate with time in an approximately linear trend under the two scenarios. Under RCP8.5, by 2050, the effects of warming climate would dominate over the heating policy change, and heating demand would be lower than the present day HDD and continue to decrease until the end of the century. Energy demand and the number of the heating days during peak winter shows no dependence on heating policy, as the policy-induced increase of energy demand would occur primarily during warmer months of the year. In addition, the indices are further weighted by population, and results show that increases in both HDDs and NHDs can be found in parts of northern China due to the increased population there by the end of the 21st century.

Spatio-temporal analysis of urban air pollutants throughout China during 2014–2019

“…Therefore, compared with developed countries, China still has higher concentrations of PM and gaseous pollutants, and thus the government needs to continue to pay attention to air pollution in the future. Changes in monthly averages of AQI, PM 2.5 , PM 10 , CO, SO 2 , and NO 2 conformed to a U-shaped pattern, with the highest values in late autumn and winter (November to February) and the lowest values in summer (June to August), which is consistent with the results of previous studies (Cui et al 2019;Ji et al 2019) required when individual heating equipment was used (Shi et al 2018). Furthermore, the actual energy-saving effect in central heating is only 60.04% of the theoretical energysaving value (Lin and Lin 2019); (b) bad weather conditions, such as temperature inversions and low-powered air convection in winter, may hinder the diffusion and dilution of atmospheric pollutants (Zhan et al 2017); (c) the higher atmospheric mixed layer and increased precipitation in the summer facilitated pollution dilution and deposition of atmospheric pollutants (Cui et al 2019;Yao et al 2019).…”

Impacts of climate change on heating and cooling degree‐hours over China

“…Therefore, using the degree‐hours method is a more precise way compared to degree‐days, especially for individual heating or cooling. But in our country, due to some historical reasons, the central heating system are used in northern China in cold season (Shen and Liu, 2016; Shi et al ., 2016; 2018b), which means the threshold for heating cannot be changed during the heating period. How to make the heating system more efficient and meanwhile to save energy is worthwhile to consider in the future.…”

Effect of Urban Greening on Incremental PM2.5 Concentration During Peak Hours

“…China covers many degrees of latitude, with complicated terrain and radical variations in climate, which produces significant variation in north-south vegetation composition. For the final model, we also added a vegetation-type dummy variable N/S in order to control for season-variant fixed effects such that each city was assigned a value of 1 (deciduous vegetation) or 0 (evergreen vegetation) according to whether it was or was not at north of 32°N latitude limit, well-known as the so-called Qinling-Huaihe line (around 32° N in the eastern part of China), which is also the generally accepted boundary line of heating ( 45 ).…”