On the correlation between building heat demand and wind energy supply and how it helps to avoid blackouts
Mark Z. Jacobson
Abstract
Keeping the electric and heat grids stable is the major challenge facing the world as it transitions away from fossil fuels to electricity and heat provided by wind, water, and sunlight (WWS). Because building heating and cooling demands and wind and solar energy supplies both depend on the same weather, building demands should be modeled consistently with renewable supplies. However, no model to date has calculated future thermal loads consistently with future renewable supplies. Here, a global weather/climate model is used to do this. Grid stability in 24 world regions encompassing 143 countries is then examined. Low cost solutions are found everywhere. Building heat loads are found to correlate strongly with wind energy supply aggregated over large, cold regions. Moderate correlations are found elsewhere, except no correlation is found in some tropical islands and some small countries. Thus, wind energy in most climates can help to meet seasonal heat loads, thereby helping to reduce the cost of energy. Finally, wind and solar power supplies are negatively correlated, indicating that wind and solar are complementary in nature and should both be built, where feasible, to reduce output variability arising from installing only one of them.