Worldwide impacts of climate change on energy for heating and cooling

The energy sector is not only a major contributor to greenhouse gases, it is also vulnerable to climate change and will have to adapt to future climate conditions. The objective of this study is to analyze the impacts of changes in future temperatures on the heating and cooling services of buildings and the resulting energy and macro-economic effects at global and regional levels. For this purpose, the techno-economic TIMES-WORLD and the general equilibrium GEMINI-E3 models are coupled with a climate model, PLASIM-ENTS. The key results are as follows. At the global level, the climate feedback induced by adaptation of the energy system to heating and cooling is found to be insignicant, partly because heating and cooling-induced changes compensate and partly because they represent a limited share of total nal energy consumption. However, signicant changes are observed at regional levels, more particularly in terms of additional power capacity required to satisfy additional cooling services, resulting in increases in electricity prices. In terms of macro-economic impacts, welfare gains and losses are associated more with changes in energy exports and imports than with changes in energy consumption for heating and cooling. The rebound eect appears to be non-negligible. To conclude, the coupling of models of dierent nature was successful and showed that the energy and economic impacts of climate change on heating and cooling remain small at the global level, but changes in energy needs will be visible at more local scale.