Energy efficiency to reduce residential electricity and natural gas use under climate change

Abstract

Climate change could significantly affect consumer demand for energy in buildings, as changing temperatures may alter heating and cooling loads. Warming climates could also lead to the increased adoption and use of cooling technologies in buildings. We assess residential electricity and natural gas demand in Los Angeles, California under multiple climate change projections and investigate the potential for energy efficiency to offset increased demand. We calibrate residential energy use against metered data, accounting for differences in building materials and appliances. Under temperature increases, we find that without policy intervention, residential electricity demand could increase by as much as 41–87% between 2020 and 2060. However, aggressive policies aimed at upgrading heating/cooling systems and appliances could result in electricity use increases as low as 28%, potentially avoiding the installation of new generation capacity. We therefore recommend aggressive energy efficiency, in combination with low-carbon generation sources, to offset projected increases in residential energy demand.

Assessing the Potential to Reduce U.S. Building CO2 Emissions 80% by 2050

“…Primarily, none of the models identified are developed to support continuous updating, with the majority of studies being a single-time snapshot of scenarios. [24][25][26][27][28][29][30] Climate change mitigation will be a decades-long effort, and developing effective mitigation strategies will require models that are regularly updated with the best available data on a range of exogenous factors-technology R&D investment and technology commercialization, changes in the electricity generation mix, and evolving consumer behavior and preferences. Secondly, many of the studies identified use a top-down approach, which aggregates the total savings available from the buildings sector and focuses on macroeconomic trends rather than specific policy-or technology-driven savings.…”

Alignment between nationally determined contributions and the sustainable development goals for West Africa

“…Reduction in energy cost for households leading to improved savings for other things. This would create job opportunities for the local people (Reyna and Chester, 2017).…”

The critical role of humidity in modeling summer electricity demand across the United States

“…Despite the rich literature in electricity demand prediction 2,[20][21][22][23] , little prior work has focused on exploring the climate sensitivity of demand with respect to different measures of heat beyond air temperature. While climate science research establishes air temperature as an incomplete measure of the surface heat content 9,10,18,24,25 , the majority of the existing research on climate-demand nexus use air temperature -or features derived from air temperature, such as cooling and heating degree days-as key predictors 2,[26][27][28] .…”