Cross-sectoral trade-offs in a changing climate: Surrogate models to balance home energy bills, occupant comfort, and power system externalities
Electrifying buildings using heat pumps may exacerbate the trade-offs between the sometimes-conflicting objectives of building occupants, power systems, and society. To navigate these, we develop a modeling framework that rapidly co-optimizes home energy bills, indoor temperatures, power system air pollution externalities, and peak demand costs. We demonstrate this framework for 17,000 representative single-family homes across 54 U.S. cities under historical and future climates, monetizing thermal discomfort using the travel cost method. Across climates, utility bills and thermal discomfort dominate trade-offs. Other factors play a smaller role. We show that, controlling for home size, the cost of improving thermal comfort is 50% lower in post-2000 homes than in pre-1950 homes. Of the 212 combinations of city, estimated income group pair, house size, and season analyzed, the lower-income household pays more for a marginal increase in thermal comfort in 137 cases, but this difference is significant only in 39 cases.
Energy Modelling, Energy policy
Nawawi, Shuhaib, Ming Yi, Michael Craig, Thomas Deetjen, and Parth Vaishnav. “Cross-Sectoral Trade-Offs in a Changing Climate: Surrogate Models to Balance Home Energy Bills, Occupant Comfort, and Power System Externalities.” iScience 28, no. 6 (2025): 112728. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.112728. CSS25-45.