ABSTRACT City‐level energy efficiency and supply policies are crucial climate actions to maintain energy robustness, security, and resilience under climate change. This study developed a benchmarking method to measure the performance of a city's climate policies for energy robustness. The method is proposed based on an existing regression‐based inverse modeling toolkit to model the power consumption of a city's energy grid with its ambient temperature. The method uses the model coefficients for risk metrics to rate the city's energy policy performance in terms of energy efficiency and supply capacity and hence its energy robustness to climate change with climate simulation data. A case study with the proposed method shows that Tokyo and Toronto do not have sufficient energy supply capacities and cooling equipment energy efficiency for energy robustness under climate change, while New York City and Singapore have high robustness with a low maximum power utilization rate at risk by 2100 under the SSP‐5.85 scenario. It demonstrates how cities' energy robustness against climate change can be measured in utilization rates per temperature change (%/°C) and maximum power utilization rate at risk (%) and if a city's climate actions have secured its energy robustness. Limitations and hence proposed future work related to choice of other input variables for regions and cities in developing regions, variation of the definition of supply capacity, proprietary nature of other related benchmarks, and absence of continuously measured data for benchmarks are also discussed.
Howard Cheung (Mon,) studied this question.