Projected California warming promises cycle of more heat waves, energy use for next century

Science Daily: As the 21st century progresses, major cities in heavily air-conditioned California can expect more frequent extreme-heat events because of climate change.

This could mean increased electricity demand for the densely populated state, raising the risk of power shortages during heat waves, said Norman Miller, an earth scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Katharine Hayhoe, a climate researcher at Texas Tech University. If the electricity were generated using fossil fuels, this could also mean even more emissions of heat-trapping gases that cause climate change.

Their results were published in the online version of the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. Co-authors included Maximilian Auffhammer, of the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at UC Berkeley, and Jiming Jin, formerly of the Earth Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab and now at Utah State University.

"Electricity demand for industrial and home cooling increases near linearly with temperature," said lead author Miller, a climate scientist and a principal investigator with the Energy Biosciences Institute in Berkeley. "In the future, widespread climate warming across the western U.S. could further strain the electricity grid, making brownouts or even rolling blackouts more frequent."

When projected future changes in extreme heat and observed relationships between high temperature and electricity demand for California are mapped onto current availability, the researchers discovered a potential for electricity deficits as high as 17 percent during peak electricity demand periods.

….In the future, the authors say, the state should brace for summers dominated by heat wave conditions such as those experienced this year. Extreme heat and heat wave events have already triggered major electricity shortages, most notably in the summer of 2006. Given past events, the results of this study suggest that future increases in peak electricity demand may challenge current and future electricity supply and transmission capacities….

Los Angeles skyline from Griffith Observatory, shot by Serouj, who has generously released the image into the public domain via Wikimedia Commons