Highly energy efficient housing can reduce peak load and increase safety under beneficial electrification

Abstract

Climate change is driving urgent investments in decarbonization. One core decarbonization strategy is to electrify energy services that currently directly use fossil fuels, because electricity can be generated from zero greenhouse gas energy resources. Shifting fossil-based services to electricity, however, requires a major expansion of electricity supply and increases dependence on electricity for critical services. Home heating is a particular challenge, especially in very cold climates. Unserved heating loads can be fatal. Electrified heating is expected to drive peak loads (and thus overall grid size) due to high coincident and nondeferrable loads. This study shows that highly efficient housing presents an opportunity to simultaneously protect people and structurally reduce peak load, reducing the need for electricity supply infrastructure while increasing people’s resilience to weather extremes. This study uses seven building efficiency scenarios from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s End Use Saving Shapes to investigate the impact of residential building efficiency on grid size in 2050, using the example of Pierre, South Dakota as a very cold weather location that might also experience substantial new housing demand due to climate-induced human mobility. We find that the deepest efficiency electrification scenario we investigate reduces peak demand by about half relative to low-efficiency electrification. Costs of about $3900/kilowatt (kW) peak load reduction are competitive with the cost of new decarbonized supplies capable of meeting peak load, though building efficiency costs are usually privatized while supply expansion costs are distributed across ratepayers. Decarbonization scenarios suggest the US grid might need to expand by a factor of 5–8 in the next 25 years: extremely rapid growth will be needed regardless, but targets might not be reachable with inefficient end users. Residential building efficiency presents an urgent opportunity to reduce peak demand and provide safer and more resilient housing.