Energy Demand Projections in the 21st Century for Coastal California

Abstract

Previous studies conducted by Lebassi et al. (2010) and Sequera et al. (2011) have showed a strong correlation between summer temperature and electricity demand per capita trends for the past four decades for California. Decreasing summer temperature trends in low elevation coastal California sites between 1970–2010 resulted in decreasing electricity demand for the same locations. On the other hand, increasing temperature trends in high-elevation and inland California sites for the same period showed increasing electricity demand during summers. As a consequence of an increased gradient of the concurrent sea breeze potential for the same period, the authors suggested that this increased in sea breeze was responsible for the observed coastal cooling, attributing the seabreeze increase to a counter effect of global warming. The authors also reported increasing temperatures during winter throughout California for the same period, resulting in decreasing natural gas consumption. This work extends this analysis by determining spatial and temporal trends in residential electricity and natural gas consumption using 1990 to 2009 data from the California Energy Commission. Results show yearly electricity consumption per person is lower for coastal counties than inland counties. In contrast, yearly natural gas consumption per capita is decreasing for both coastal and inland counties. Additional work includes the examination of future summer axysymmetric warming and winter homogenous warming as well as their implications on energy demands into the 21st century. Results from 16 downscaled Global Circulation Models for 2 green-house gas emissions scenarios are used to forecast future average temperatures. These projections are correlated with electricity consumption during the summer and natural gas consumption during the winter. Statistical analysis of these results is provided in order to quantify uncertainty on these forecasts.