A multi-paradigm framework to assess the impacts of climate change on end-use energy demand

Abstract

Projecting the long-term trends in energy demand is an increasingly complex endeavor due to the uncertain emerging changes in factors such as climate and policy. The existing energy-economy paradigms used to characterize the long-term trends in the energy sector do not adequately account for climate variability and change. In this paper, we propose a multi-paradigm framework for estimating the climate sensitivity of end-use energy demand that can easily be integrated with the existing energy-economy models. To illustrate the applicability of our proposed framework, we used the energy demand and climate data in the state of Indiana to train a Bayesian predictive model. We then leveraged the end-use demand trends as well as downscaled future climate scenarios to generate probabilistic estimates of the future end-use demand for space cooling, space heating and water heating, at the individual household and building level, in the residential and commercial sectors. Our results indicated that the residential load is much more sensitive to climate variability and change than the commercial load. Moreover, since the largest fraction of the residential energy demand in Indiana is attributed to heating, future warming scenarios could lead to reduced end-use demand due to lower space heating and water heating needs. In the commercial sector, the overall energy demand is expected to increase under the future warming scenarios. This is because the increased cooling load during hotter summer months will likely outpace the reduced heating load during the more temperate winter months.

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

“…Specifically, unanticipated higher demand for space conditioning and refrigeration during heat waves has led to rolling outages with serious socio-economic and public health consequences [7][8][9][10][11][12] . In light of the expected increase in frequency and intensity of climate extremes 3 , climate-induced outages are an increasing risk to the resilient operation of the electric power infrastructure [13][14][15][16][17] .…”

Analyzing the climate sensitivity of the coupled water-electricity demand nexus in the Midwestern United States

“…This will continue until a certain number of iterations has been completed, at which point the weighted predictions will be combined as a final model. This algorithm has been used in a variety of predictive applications, ranging from psychological well-being [22] to infrastructure resilience [23]. A more detailed discussion on the algorithm can be found in Miller et al [22]…”

“…In this study, there were two response variables: residential electricity use and residential water use, both normalized by the number of customers served, and 8 meteorological and climatic predictors. There was a focus on variables that are easily measured by meteorological stations because of the availability of such data, as well as the results of previous studies, which showed the importance of meteorological variables on water and electricity demand [32,33,23,34]. Similarly, it has been shown that the El Niño/Southern Oscillation plays an important role in affecting hydroclimatic processes across the US, and reservoir levels in particular [35], and thus making it an important variable to include in the analysis of residential water use.…”

Climate Change and Indiana’s Energy Sector: A Report from the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment

“…heating and cooling systems in buildings to large-scale electricity generation infrastructure). For this report, existing research on Indiana's future energy demand and supply based on projected fuel prices and growth rates (Lu 2015) was used in conjunction with projected energy demand and supply shifts in the commercial and residential sectors due to climate change from the statewide Bayesian analysis (Nateghi and Mukherjee 2017).…”