Urban forest impacts on regional cooling and heating energy use: Sacramento County case study

This early foundational paper was one of the first to attempt to model the energy impacts of trees at the regional scale, here Sacramento County, CA. It builds upon work estimating how shade impacts energy use of individual buildings. Models factors included building size, type (residential vs commercial/industrial), and vintage; tree density and tree canopy; solar radiation, temperature, and wind speed. This study estimates that of the approximately 3.5 million trees on residential and commercial land in Sacramento County, 32% have shading potential. These trees reduce electricity use by 157 GWh (10.9% of total cooling electricity use), peak energy use by 124 MW (6.1%,) and heating by 145 TJ (0.7%). An in-depth discussion of sensitivity analysis is included.