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Most buildings still rely on fossil energy --- such as oil, coal and natural gas --- for heating. This is because they are readily available and have higher heat value than their cleaner counterparts. However, these primary sources of energy are also high pollutants. As the grid moves towards eliminating CO 2 emission, replacing these sources of energy with cleaner alternatives is imperative. Electric heat pumps --- an alternative and cleaner heating technology --- have been proposed as a viable replacement. In this paper, we conduct a data-driven optimization study to analyze the potential of reducing carbon emission by replacing gas-based heating with electric heat pumps 1 . We do so while enforcing equity in such transition. We begin by conducting an in-depth analysis into the energy patterns and demographic profiles of buildings. Our analysis reveals a huge disparity between lower and higher income households. We show that the energy usage intensity for lower income homes is 24% higher than higher income homes. Next, we analyze the potential for carbon emission reduction by transitioning gas-based heating systems to electric heat pumps for an entire city. We then propose equity-aware transition strategies for selecting a subset of customers for heat pump-based retrofits which embed various equity metrics and balances the need to maximize carbon reduction with ensuring equitable outcomes for households. We evaluate their effect on CO 2 emission reduction, showing that such equity-aware carbon emission reduction strategies achieve significant emission reduction while also reducing the disparity in the value of selected homes by 5X compared to a carbon-first approach.
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Equitable Network-Aware Decarbonization of Residential Heating at City Scale
Residential heating, primarily powered by natural gas, accounts for a significant portion of residential sector energy use and carbon emissions in many parts of the world. Hence, there is a push towards decarbonizing residential heating by transitioning to energyefficient heat pumps powered by an increasingly greener and less carbon-intensive electric grid. However, such a transition will add additional load to the electric grid triggering infrastructure upgrades, and subsequently erode the customer base using the gas distribution network. Utilities want to guide these transition efforts to ensure a phased decommissioning of the gas network and deferred electric grid infrastructure upgrades while achieving carbon reduction goals. To facilitate such a transition, we present a network-aware optimization framework for decarbonizing residential heating at city scale with an objective to maximize carbon reduction under budgetary constraints. Our approach operates on a graph representation of the gas network topology to compute the cost of transitioning and select neighborhoods for transition. We further extend our approach to explicitly incorporate equity and ensure an equitable distribution of benefits across different socioeconomic groups. We apply our framework to a city in the New England region of the U.S., using real-world gas usage, electric usage, and grid infrastructure data. We show that our networkaware strategy achieves 55% higher carbon reductions than prior network-oblivious work under the same budget. Our equity-aware strategy achieves an equitable outcome while preserving the carbon reduction benefits of the network-aware strategy.
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- PAR ID:
- 10441156
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 13
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Heating buildings using fossil fuels such as natural gas, propane and oil makes up a significant proportion of the aggregate carbon emissions every year. Because of this, there is a strong interest in decarbonizing residential heating systems using new technologies such as electric heat pumps. In this paper, we conduct a data-driven optimization study to analyze the potential of replacing gas heating with electric heat pumps to reduce CO 2 emission in a city-wide distribution grid. We conduct an in-depth analysis of gas consumption in the city and the resulting carbon emissions. We then present a flexible multi-objective optimization (MOO) framework that optimizes carbon emission reduction while also maximizing other aspects of the energy transition such as carbon-efficiency, and minimizing energy inefficiency in buildings. Our results show that replacing gas with electric heat pumps has the potential to cut carbon emissions by up to 81%. We also show that optimizing for other aspects such as carbon-efficiency and energy inefficiency introduces tradeoffs with carbon emission reduction that must be considered during transition. Finally, we present a detailed analysis of the implication of proposed transition strategies on the household energy consumption and utility bills, electric grid upgrades, and decarbonization policies. We compute the additional energy demand from electric heat pumps at the household as well as the transformer level and discuss how our results can inform decarbonization policies at city scale.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3575813.3576870
