Abstract
Rising ambient temperatures due to climate change will increase urban populations’ exposures to extreme heat. During hot hours, a key protective adaptation is increased air conditioning and associated consumption of electricity for cooling. But during cold hours, milder temperatures have the offsetting effect of reducing consumption of electricity and other fuels for heating. We elucidate the net consequences of these opposing effects in 36 cities in different world regions. We couple reduced-form statistical models of cities’ hourly responses of electric load to temperature with temporally downscaled projections of temperatures simulated by 21 global climate models (GCMs), projecting the effects of warming on the demand for electricity circa 2050. Cities' responses, temperature exposures and impacts are heterogeneous, with changes in total annual consumption ranging from -2.7 to 5.7%, and peak power demand increasing by as much as 9.5% at the multi-GCM median. The largest increases are concentrated in more economically developed mid-latitude cities, with less developed urban areas in the tropics exhibiting relatively small changes. The results highlight the important role of the structure of electricity demand: large temperature increases in tropical cities are offset by their inelastic responses, which can be attributed to lower air-conditioning penetration.
Highlights
Rising ambient temperatures due to climate change will increase urban populations’ exposures to extreme heat
The diversity of responses in our results indicates a reversal of the north-south gradient of electricity demand impacts demonstrated in previous research[30], which suggests the need for caution extrapolating impact responses derived for the midlatitudes to locations in the tropics
Three tropical cities (Mbabane City, Kupang, and Nairobi) exhibit patterns of electricity demand that are largely unresponsive to temperature, likely because of idiosyncratic geographic factors. (These areas experience a wide range of seasonal temperatures (5–35 ◦ C) and Mbabane and Nairobi are located at high altitudes with relatively mild climates, which may obviate the need for substantial cooling, Scientific Reports | (2022) 12:4280 |
Summary
Rising ambient temperatures due to climate change will increase urban populations’ exposures to extreme heat. Econometric models of the nonlinear response of electric load to daily temperatures have been developed over broad spatial d omains[18,30] while recent estimates of high frequency cooling demand have combined high-resolution meteorological simulations with land use maps and simple transformations of load data for individual c ities[31] We improve upon these approaches by using hourly temperature observations to scale climate projections, and combining the results with empirically-derived impact response surfaces to estimate mid-century warming effects on electricity demand. We temporally downscale GCM simulated future temperature projections by combining the diurnal cycle of hourly temperatures from E RA532 with daily maximum and minimum temperatures from 21 GCMs in NEX-GDDP to construct hourly temperature series for current (2006-2020) and mid-century (2046–2060) climates that shed light on climatically-induced increases in urban extreme heat exposures and the demand for adaptation through cooling and electricity use We combine these projections with our response surfaces to produce estimates of hourly impacts to electricity demand in 2050. While we are not able to observe additional attributes that may be responsible for intra-urban variation in energy demand (e.g., built environment heat transfer characteristics, prevalence of air conditioning), nor how developing cities may evolve in the future with urbanization, our results identify and characterize distinct patterns of temperature-responsive demand across cities, indicating these these areas are intriguing and merit further investigation
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