Planning for Heat Resilience and the Future of Residential Electricity Usage

Community resilience refers to the ability for a geographic area to respond and adapt to acute shocks and long-term stresses. Geography research is well positioned to examine how communities can adapt to the compounding effects of climate change. Our work aims to analyze the factors that influence residential electricity in the context of increasing urban temperatures in Maricopa County, Arizona, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic. Using census tracts as our basis for analysis, we quantified factors that influence electricity use related to neighborhood characteristics, home structures, social situations, pricing policies, and work-from-home estimates. Our findings suggest that the structure of the home (e.g., number of rooms and house size) influences the variation in residential electricity use, whereas trees and small-area temperatures were not factors. We then compared above-median-income census tracts to those that were below the median income. We found fewer factors influenced electricity use in the lower income census tracts and that they were also related mostly to the home structure. Our analysis did not reveal that working from home was significant, but we did find that the average household size was significant and that the amount of influence increased from 2019 to 2020, suggesting that the stay-at-home policies from the pandemic did affect electricity use. As we consider and implement work-from-home strategies, families need to recognize that the home structure plays a crucial role in determining electricity usage.