Climate change and electrification could fundamentally alter grid planning paradigms

Abstract

Responding to climate change will qualitatively change electricity demand patterns, with increased peak sensitivity to temperature. Rising temperatures increase space cooling demand, and electrifying heat increases temperature-dependent, non-deferrable load while solar and battery resource availabilities are limited. Here, we present a first-order scoping analysis to characterize relationships between temperature and electricity load across the contiguous US to argue winter peaks pose a hard, underexplored design constraint. Specifically, residential heating electrification with efficient equipment could drive an estimated increase of 120%–200% (1000–1600 gigawatts, GW) in the sum of total peak loads (not necessarily coincident across balancing authorities), requiring at least 4.0–6.6 trillion USD of investment for generation and transmission infrastructure. By contrast, even 4 °C of warming would drive only a ∼41 GW (5%) increase. Deep building efficiency could improve energy and health equity, reduce challenging peaks, facilitate deep decarbonization, and save trillions of dollars.