Predicting Public Health Impacts of Electricity Usage
This addresses the need for health-informed energy management to reduce air pollution impacts on communities, though it is incremental as it builds on existing demand-side approaches.
The paper tackles predicting public health impacts from electricity usage by introducing HealthPredictor, an AI model that links electricity use to health outcomes, and shows it yields substantially lower prediction errors than baselines in U.S. regions.
The electric power sector is a leading source of air pollutant emissions, impacting the public health of nearly every community. Although regulatory measures have reduced air pollutants, fossil fuels remain a significant component of the energy supply, highlighting the need for more advanced demand-side approaches to reduce the public health impacts. To enable health-informed demand-side management, we introduce HealthPredictor, a domain-specific AI model that provides an end-to-end pipeline linking electricity use to public health outcomes. The model comprises three components: a fuel mix predictor that estimates the contribution of different generation sources, an air quality converter that models pollutant emissions and atmospheric dispersion, and a health impact assessor that translates resulting pollutant changes into monetized health damages. Across multiple regions in the United States, our health-driven optimization framework yields substantially lower prediction errors in terms of public health impacts than fuel mix-driven baselines. A case study on electric vehicle charging schedules illustrates the public health gains enabled by our method and the actionable guidance it can offer for health-informed energy management. Overall, this work shows how AI models can be explicitly designed to enable health-informed energy management for advancing public health and broader societal well-being. Our datasets and code are released at: https://github.com/Ren-Research/Health-Impact-Predictor.