Understanding the Response of a Future Electric Grid in California to Climate Change Impacts on Building Energy Demand
Abstract
Future climate forcing combined with increased electrification of buildings can significantly affect future energy demands from the built environment. Increased average and extreme temperatures have the potential to increase building cooling loads and combined with increased appliance electrification, can impose significant loads onto the electricity system. These effects have strong implications for greenhouse gas emissions and capacity requirements on the electric grid. In parallel, the electric grid is rapidly transforming to meet environmental and reliability goals. Investigation of climate change effects on energy demand have historically focused on assessing building energy demand only without translation to grid impacts, or have focused on impacts to a current-day grid configuration. In this study, we combine climate forcing data, building energy modeling using the EnergyPlus platform, and electric grid modeling using the Holistic Grid Resource Integration and Deployment (HiGRID) platform to investigate how the individual and combined effects of climate change and electrification on building electricity demand translate to impacts on a future electric grid configuration in California, consistent with the time period where climate change effects are expected to be significant. We found that if California realized plans to meet long-term greenhouse gas reduction goals through aggressive renewable energy deployment by 2050, climate change only prompted modest increases in grid resource capacity and negligible difference in greenhouse gas emissions since the additional electric load generally occurred during times with available renewable generation. Increased building appliance electrification, however, prompted a 30-40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions but required significant grid resource capacity increases, due to the higher magnitude of load increases and lack of readily available renewable generation during the times when electrified heating loads occurred. Overall, this study translates climate change and electrification impacts on buildings to system-wide electric grid impacts on future electric grid configurations and highlights the complexities associated with translating building-level impacts to electric system-wide impacts.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMGC22A..05T
- Keywords:
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- 1622 Earth system modeling;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE