Sep 2026· Environmental Research Letters· Vol 21, pp. 174016· 0 citations· 42 references
Physics
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.
Planning electricity systems under conditions of deep uncertainty hinders the already challenging task of meeting growing electricity demands while aligning with sustainability objectives. In this work we use an ensemble of three analyzes (frequency of technology appearance across modeled scenarios, importance of uncer...
Chris Fitzgibbon, I. Elder, I. D. Posen et al.· Environmental Research Commu...· 0 citations
Saudi Arabia is increasing renewable energy generation, electrifying its systems and implementing digital technologies in the grid, all against a backdrop of a climate in which summer temperatures, dust, humidity and other co-occurring environmental stresses simultaneously raise demand and degrade the electricity infra...
Hatel Peera Shaik· Global academic journal of e...· 0 citations
Renewable-capacity planning can overstate decarbonization in a supply-constrained system because new clean generation may initially restore unmet electricity service rather than displace fossil output. This study develops a public-evidence-constrained, service-first planning framework for Iraq. Photovoltaic (PV), wind,...
In cold-region industrial parks, prolonged heating seasons and intensive hot water demands trigger severe temporal mismatches between stochastic renewable generation and rigid thermal requirements. To address this, a multidimensional synergistic optimization framework for industrial thermal energy systems is proposed....
Peng-Yan Yao, Hong-Kun He, Jia-Le Pan et al.· Energies· 0 citations
Electrifying transport and heat are central to climate change mitigation, as electricity is unequivocally lower carbon than burning fuels in cars, boilers and furnaces. In a recent paper, Dunstan and Drew argue that expanding electrification before complete power-sector decarbonisation yields no proven emissions saving...
Iain Staffell, R. Lowes, Daniel Mehlig et al.· Environmental Research: Ener...· 1 citation
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