ABSTRACT
Behavioral responses to environmental risks create gains and losses. We use high-frequency datasets to elucidate such behavior responses against air pollution and find a "double-peaked" time pattern in reducing outdoor exposure and in increasing electricity consumption. Despite that one standard deviation increase in the Air Quality Index induces 2% less outdoor population and 6% more household electricity consumption at peak, most responses fail to match with the intra-day pollution peaks, implying ineffective exposure avoidance. We find an unbalanced trade-off between health benefits and energy co-damages. The behavior-induced change in annual residential power consumption (+1.01% to +1.20%) is estimated to be 20 times more than that in the population-based exposure (-0.02% to -0.05%), and generates 0.13-0.15 million more metric tons of citywide carbon emissions. Our results imply that by targeting peak pollution periods, policies can shrink the trade-off imbalance and achieve mutual improvements in exposure reduction and energy conservation.
ABSTRACT
What are the benefits and drawbacks, and for whom?.
ABSTRACT
Estimating the impact of climate change on energy use across the globe is essential for analysis of both mitigation and adaptation policies. Yet existing empirical estimates are concentrated in Western countries, especially the United States. We use daily data on household electricity consumption to estimate how electricity consumption would change in Shanghai in the context of climate change. For colder days <7 °C, a 1 °C increase in daily temperature reduces electricity consumption by 2.8%. On warm days >25 °C, a 1 °C increase in daily temperatures leads to a 14.5% increase in electricity consumption. As income increases, households' weather sensitivity remains the same for hotter days in the summer but increases during the winter. We use this estimated behavior in conjunction with a collection of downscaled global climate models (GCMs) to construct a relationship between future annual global mean surface temperature (GMST) changes and annual residential electricity consumption. We find that annual electricity consumption increases by 9.2% per +1 °C in annual GMST. In comparison, annual peak electricity use increases by as much as 36.1% per +1 °C in annual GMST. Although most accurate for Shanghai, our findings could be most credibly extended to the urban areas in the Yangtze River Delta, covering roughly one-fifth of China's urban population and one-fourth of the gross domestic product.
