Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
Climate Change Implications For
US Energy Supply And Use
This section summarizes current knowledge from research and practice about major
vulnerabilities, risks, and impact concerns for diferent aspects of US energy supply and
use in order to arrive at a number of summary assessment indings.
A. Implications Of Climate Change for Energy Use
As the climate of the world changes, the consumption of energy in climate-sensitive
sectors in the United States is expected to change. The most obvious and most-studied
efects are changes in energy in buildings for space conditioning as a result of reduced
demand for space cooling and increased demand for space cooling. Studies to date show
regionally-varying decreases in the amount of energy expected to be consumed on site
in residential, commercial, and industrial buildings for space heating, and increases for
space cooling. Most studies project the efects of climate change and other variables af-
fecting energy demand, but do not fully integrate all of the other factors afecting de-
mand and supply or energy prices, all of which will afect actual future energy use. The
following discussion emphasizes changes in demand resulting from climate change.
The current balance between energy use for heating and cooling in U.S. buildings
varies by latitude (and to some degree by longitude) and can be expected to shift with
warming from predominantly heating to predominantly cooling in some regions with
moderate climates. Because the balance between heating and cooling difers by loca-
tion, changes are expected in the balance of energy use among delivery forms and fuel
types, as between electricity used for air conditioning and natural gas and fuel oil used
for heating. Primary energy demand includes energy losses in generation, transmission,
and distribution in both heating and cooling, but these losses are greater for cooling;
so climate-change-induced switching from heating to cooling in regions with moder-
ate climates tends to increase primary energy demand, even if site energy use declines.
Increased cooling demand leads to increases in peak electricity demand in most regions,
which increases the need to build electricity generation, transmission, and distribution
facilities to meet the new peak (Miller et al., 2007, 2008;, Franco and Sandstad, 2008;
Messner et al., 2009; Hamlet et al., 2010; Hayhoe et al., 2010; NPCC, 2010; Lu et al.,
2010). It is likely that there will also be increases in energy (primarily electricity) used to
pump water for irrigated agriculture and to pump and treat water for municipal uses.
There is almost no new information concerning the impacts of climate change on energy
consumption in other climate-sensitive sectors of the economy, such as transportation,
construction, and agriculture. Although there are likely to be climate-change related de-
creases in energy used directly in certain processes such as residential, commercial, and
