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.