Projecting the urban energy demand for Indiana, USA, in 2050 and 2080

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Projecting the urban energy demand for Indiana, USA, in 2050 and 2080 Liz Wachs1 · Shweta Singh2 Received: 10 June 2018 / Accepted: 20 November 2019 / © Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract Energy use is one of the largest drivers of climate change, but the large share of energy used for space heating and cooling is also driven by climate change. Demand for energy, particularly cooling, is important for long-range infrastructure planning. Urban areas represent a very small proportion of total land, but usually consume the majority of energy. In this work, statistical, top-down approaches are used to model residential and commercial urban energy demand changes in Indiana, a state in the Midwest region of the USA, in 2050 and 2080 under the climate change scenarios of RCP 4.5 and 8.5. By modeling energy demand changes in urban areas in Indiana, we can project the majority of energy demand while placing it in a spatial perspective that is missing from the statewide estimates. Two time periods are used to give an intuitive time stamp and temporal perspective. Results indicate that Indiana’s northernmost cities are expected to show significantly increased residential cooling demand due to climate change by 2080. Indianapolis represents an increasing share of total urban commercial and residential energy use over the next 60 years. Transportation is expected to represent a larger share of energy use as heating demand declines under climate change scenarios. Keywords Urban · Energy · Climate change

1 Introduction Cities are home to a majority of the world’s population but make up less than 3% of terrestrial land (Seto et al. 2015), and possibly as little as 0.51% (Schneider et al. 2009). Accordingly, the International Energy Agency posited that 64% of global primary energy This article is part of a Special Issue on “The Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment” edited by Jeffrey Dukes, Melissa Widhalm, Daniel Vimont, and Linda Prokopy.  Shweta Singh

[email protected] 1

Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA

2

Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Division of Environmental and Ecological Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA

Climatic Change

use took place in cities in 2013 (Masanet et al. 2016). This trend has also been found in the USA (Parshall et al. 2010), which is important both for forecasting future energy use and targeting policies. While this work is focused on the consequences of climate change in terms of energy use, energy use is also one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, representing a feedback loop. Particularly after the exit of the USA from the Paris Agreement, increasing attention has been placed on the potential for more distributed action by the more than 300 “climate mayors,” who have affirmed their commitment to meet international goals for climate change mitigation (Watts 2017). As part of the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment (IN CCIA), high-resolution fo