Climate change and 2030 cooling demand in Ahmedabad, India: opportunities for expansion of renewable energy and cool roofs

Abstract

Most of India’s current electricity demand is met by combustion of fossil fuels, particularly coal. But the country has embarked on a major expansion of renewable energy and aims for half of its electricity needs to be met by renewable sources by 2030. As climate change-driven temperature increases continue to threaten India’s population and drive increased demand for air conditioning, there is a need to estimate the local benefits of policies that increase renewable energy capacity and reduce cooling demand in buildings. We investigate the impacts of climate change-driven temperature increases, along with population and economic growth, on demand for electricity to cool buildings in the Indian city of Ahmedabad between 2018 and 2030. We estimate the share of energy demand met by coal-fired power plants versus renewable energy in 2030, and the cooling energy demand effects of expanded cool roof adaptation in the city. We find renewable energy capacity could increase from meeting 9% of cooling energy demand in 2018 to 45% in 2030. Our modeling indicates a near doubling in total electricity supply and a nearly threefold growth in cooling demand by 2030. Expansion of cool roofs to 20% of total roof area (associated with a 0.21 TWh reduction in cooling demand between 2018 and 2030) could more than offset the city’s climate change-driven 2030 increase in cooling demand (0.17 TWh/year). This study establishes a framework for linking climate, land cover, and energy models to help policymakers better prepare for growing cooling energy demand under a changing climate.

Air quality and health co-benefits of climate change mitigation and adaptation actions by 2030: an interdisciplinary modeling study in Ahmedabad, India

“…While the urban area of Gandhinagar is immediately adjacent to the north and the two cities are often considered together, we limited the study to Ahmedabad because of availability of local population, baseline mortality, energy, and air pollution data. With respect to air pollution emissions sources relevant to air quality in Ahmedabad, there are two local thermal coal-fired power plants in the region, both relatively old, high pollution-emitting sources (see figure 2 ); there are six total fossil fuel-fired power plants in Gujarat (Gujarat Electricity Regulatory Commission (Gandhinagar) 2022b , p 147, ( 2022a ), p 39, Joshi et al 2022 ).…”

“…The energy modeling analysis considers all plants depicted here, and air quality and health analyses focuses on the pollution impacts from the torrent power plant (TPP) in Ahmedabad (power plant #1). Adapted from (Joshi et al 2022 ), with permission from Springer Nature. CC BY 4.0 .…”

“…As part of a related analysis (Joshi et al 2022 ), we identified major point sources of PM 2.5 emissions that provide power to meet Ahmedabad’s energy demand and are in close enough proximity to also affect the city’s air quality (Guttikunda and Jawahar 2014 , System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting and Research, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology 2017 , Ganguly et al 2020 ). The coal-fired TPP in the heart of the city on the Sabarmati River, opened in 1934, was the focus for modeling energy, air quality and health.…”

“…The prior Joshi et al (2022) analysis indicated that, under a BAU energy scenario, electricity supplied by the TPP would increase by approximately 6% between 2018 and 2030, absent any additional cool roof installations to moderate cooling energy demand. To estimate the air quality effects of this increase in power ).…”

“…Results for climate and energy demand modeling, TWh denotes terawatt hours (sources:(Monaghan et al 2014, Joshi et al 2022). modified the emissions inventory deployed in WRF-Chem to increase direct air pollution emissions from the plant by a corresponding amount, and distributed changes in primary emissions to estimate air pollution concentrations in four representative months.…”