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Increase in domestic electricity consumption from particulate air pollution

Nature Energy volume 5, pages 985–995 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Accurate assessment of environmental externalities of particulate air pollution is crucial to the design and evaluation of environmental policies. Current evaluations mainly focus on direct damages resulting from exposure, missing indirect co-damages that occur through interactions among the externalities, human behaviours and technologies. Our study provides an empirical assessment of such co-damages using customer-level daily and hourly electricity data of a large sample of residential and commercial consumers in Arizona, United States. We use an instrumental variable panel regression approach and find that particulate matter air pollution increases electricity consumption in residential buildings as well as in retail and recreation service industries. Air pollution also reduces the actual electricity generated by distributed-solar panels. Lower-income and minority ethnic groups are disproportionally impacted by air pollution and pay higher electricity bills associated with pollution avoidance, stressing the importance of incorporating the consideration of environmental justice in energy policy-making.

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Fig. 1: Change in residential hourly electricity consumption due to one-unit increase in air pollution concentration.
Fig. 2: Change in daily residential electricity consumption due to one-unit increase in air pollution concentration.
Fig. 3: Change in commercial hourly electricity consumption due to one-unit increase in air pollution.
Fig. 4: Change in daily commercial electricity consumption due to one-unit increase in air pollution.

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Data availability

Records of air quality and hourly wind direction were retrieved from pre-generated data files of the United States Environmental Protection Agency at https://aqs.epa.gov/aqsweb/airdata/download_files.html. Climate factors were obtained from Global Surface Summary of the Day at ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/. The solar irradiance data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s National Solar Radiation Database is at https://maps.nrel.gov/nsrdb-viewer. The high-frequency electricity data are from the Salt River Project. As they are restricted by a non-disclosure agreement, they are available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission from the SRP. The county-level trip data are available upon request from the COVID-19 Impact Analysis Platform of the University of Maryland at https://data.covid.umd.edu/about/index.html. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

All data and models are processed in Stata 14.0. The figures are produced in R studio (based on R 3.6.1). All custom code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/hepannju/Increase-in-domestic-electricity-consumption-from-particulate-air-pollution.

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Acknowledgements

Funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 1757329. We thank J.H. Scofield, C. Canfield, Y. Li, H. Zhang and the seminar participants at the Center for Global Sustainability of University of Maryland, Division of Resource Economics and Management of University of West Virginia, and the Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy of Tsinghua University for their helpful comments during the preparation of this paper.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Pan He, Jing Liang, Yueming (Lucy) Qiu.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth System Science, Institute for Global Change Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Pan He

  2. School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Pan He

  3. School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Jing Liang & Yueming (Lucy) Qiu

  4. Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Qingran Li

  5. Department of Forecasting, Resource Planning and Development, Salt River Project, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Bo Xing

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  1. Pan He
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Contributions

All the authors conceived the paper and designed the research. P.H., J.L. and Y.Q. designed the analysis methods, performed the analyses and wrote and revised the paper. B.X. processed the data. Q.L. reviewed several draughts and made revisions.

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Correspondence to Pan He or Yueming (Lucy) Qiu.

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He, P., Liang, J., Qiu, Y.(. et al. Increase in domestic electricity consumption from particulate air pollution. Nat Energy 5, 985–995 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-020-00699-0

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