An article by Maximilian Auffhammer (University of California, Berkeley), Patrick Baylis (Stanford University), and Catherine Hausman, "Climate change is projected to have severe impacts on the frequency and intensity of peak electricity demand across the United States," appears in the February edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Abstract
The existing empirical literature on the impacts of climate change on the electricity sector has focused on changing electricity consumption patterns. In this paper, we show that incorporating impacts on the frequency and intensity of peak load consumption during hot days implies sizable required investments in peak generating capacity (or major advances in storage technology or the structure of electricity prices), which results in substantially larger impacts than those from just changes in overall consumption.
