Impacts of High Resolution Extreme Events on U.S. Energy Demand and CO2 Emissions in the 21st Century

Funding Agency: U.S. Department of Energy

Program: Office of Biological and Environmental Research

Award #: DE-FG02-08ER64649

Duration: August 15, 2008 – August 14, 2011

Award Amount: $332,593

Other Principal Investigators: Kevin Gurney (Purdue University)

Abstract:

Enhanced greenhouse forcing is likely to intensify extreme climate regimes. Because energy demand is highly sensitive to extreme temperature and precipitation events and their fine-scale space/time patterns, intensification of extreme climate regimes is likely to impact energy demand and related CO2 emissions. These impacts and their subsequent feedbacks could be a key contributor to the net damage or benefit associated with climate change.

However, even the most sophisticated studies of the potential impacts of climate change on the energy sector have failed to capture the effects of climate change at the scales at which energy use decisions are driven and made: the scale of local weather and extreme weather events. Further, due to limited data, computational restrictions, and conceptual modeling barriers, Integrated Assessment (IA) models have to-date required a “macro” or “top-down” approach, necessarily excluding interactions between weather extremes and the energy sector.

Our objective is to build fundamental knowledge regarding the impact of weather extremes on particularly sensitive portions of the energy sector, in service of the next generation of IA models. We will achieve this objective through a three-phase experimental design, which will include:

(1) Developing present relationships between weather extremes and energy use/CO2 emissions at fine space/time scales;
(2) Testing the sensitivity of energy use/CO2 emissions to changes in weather extremes; and
(3) Developing a framework for incorporating fine-scale climate/energy relationships into IA models.

In so doing, we aim to test three primary hypotheses:

(1) High spatiotemporal resolution weather extremes exert a strong control on the present heating/cooling demand of the United States.
(2) High spatiotemporal resolution weather extremes exert a strong control on other unexplored segments of the energy system of the United States.
(3) Future changes in extreme weather will impact the demand for heating/cooling and other identified energy demand segments.

The next generation of IA models must begin to incorporate the extreme events evident in climate change studies, as well as how those events interact with the energy system – and the resulting CO2 emissions – at the space/time scales with greatest vulnerability. The knowledge gained through examination of the fine-scale interaction of climate change and energy use/emissions will serve as critical new knowledge to IA modeling efforts aimed at understanding the complete physical, biological, economic and social impacts of climate change.

Our project will have a number of potential impacts. First, our analyses will be of critical importance to the IA community, which will be able to incorporate quantitative relationships between weather extremes and the energy sector into the next generation of IA models. Likewise, our analyses will be important for the energy design and planning community, which will be able to incorporate relationships between weather extremes and the energy sector into decadal-scale energy planning. Further, our analyses will be important for the policy-making community, which will be able to integrate our findings into policies that attempt to account for the costs and benefits of future climate change.