Future Energy Demand Projections of Cold Climate Cities Transitioning to Electrification

Cities are increasingly transitioning to a decarbonized energy state to mitigate global warming and enhance energy security. This future state envisions energy supply from renewable sources and widespread electrification of demand sectors. As cities evolve, the compounding effect of a changing local and global climate plays a major background role that necessitates careful consideration for energy infrastructure planning. Key sectors undergoing this transition include transportation (e.g., electric vehicles, EV) and buildings. Buildings represent the largest energy demand and atmospheric carbon sources, primarily due to the energy required for cooling and heating the spaces. For cold climate cities, this transition signifies a major shift from carbon-based space heating to electrification, potentially leading to new winter peaks in energy demand. This shift has significant implications for the local climate, including a reduction of the winter Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and potential improvements in air quality. This scenario is the case of New York State and City where the state has embarked an aggressive decarbonization process.

This work presents a framework to project new energy demands for the New York Metro Region under a transition to full electrification, considering a changing climate toward 2050. In this region, buildings account for 70% of the total energy consumption and carbon emissions. The focus is on an electrified winter for buildings and EVs, evaluating the energy infrastructure and environmental impacts of such major shifts, particularly the adoption of air source heat pumps replacing natural gas boilers for buildings at a constant annual adoption rate towards 2050. The framework quantifies baseline and climate-dependent energy loads separately, with baselines constructed from historical data evolving with EV adoption rates. For future climate forcing we consider two possible Socio-Economic Pathways (SSPs) climate scenarios from the Sixth Assessment of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5, representing low and high greenhouse gas scenarios, respectively. The specific future climate ensemble used is the downscaled 12 km resolution IM3/HyperFACETS Thermodynamic Global Warming (TGW) Simulation Dataset for the Continental US. The Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with a multi-layer building environment parameterization and building energy model (uWRF), is used to perform the climate and energy analysis. uWRF is forced by the global climate ensemble to produce future local climates and energy demand projections at 1.33-km spatial resolution.

Model results are calibrated with regional weather records for a benchmark period (2010-2020) and with Zonal Energy demand from New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) with excellent approximation. Preliminary results indicate a baseline load (demand without building) with peak of 7GW for New York City, and future projections of winter peak increase of two-fold factor (from 8GW to 16 GW) for the City, with significant reduction of the winter UHI. The presentation will outline context, methods, results, and challenges to meet these goals such as adoption rates and generation from renewables to meet these new demands.