California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE)

This study assesses for California how increasing end-use electrical energy efficiency from installing residential insulation impacts exposures and disease burden from power-plant pollutant emissions. Installation of fiberglass attic insulation in the nearly 3 million electricity-heated homes throughout California is used as a case study. The pollutants nitrous oxides (NOx), sulfur dioxide (SO2), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), benzo(a)pyrene, benzene, and naphthalene are selected for the assessment. Exposure is characterized separately for rural and urban environments using the CalTOX model, which is a key input to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Tool for the Reduction and Assessment of Chemicals and other environmental Impacts (TRACI). The output of CalTOX provides for urban and rural populations emissions-to-intake factors, which are expressed as an individual intake fraction (iFi). The typical iFi from power plant emissions are on the order of 10-13 (g intake per g emitted) in urban and rural regions. The cumulative (rural and urban) product of emissions, population, and iFi is combined with toxic effects factors to determine human damage factors (HDFs). HDF are expressed as disability adjusted life years (DALYs) per kilogram pollutant emitted. The HDF approach is applied to the insulation case study. Upgrading existing residential insulation to US Department of Energy (DOE) recommended levels eliminates over the assumed 50-year lifetime of the insulation an estimated 1000 DALYs from power-plant emissions per million tonne (Mt) of insulation installed, mostly from the elimination of PM2.5 emissions. In comparison, the estimated burden from the manufacture of this insulation in DALYs per Mt is roughly four orders of magnitude lower than that avoided.