Why is the content of this map important?
Electricity consumption plays a crucial role in adapting to climate change in terms of helping adjust to heating and cooling needs in the face of temperature changes. It is also important in mitigation as electricity accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other sector in Europe.
Which sectors are affected by this result?
As well as power generation being a main source of carbon emissions, it is also vulnerable to climate change both due to the growing share of renewable energies and due to temperature related changes in seasonal demand patterns.
What is shown on the maps?
The maps show the Weather-Value at Risk (95%) for electricity demand on working days for the reference period (1971-2000), for the +2 °C period (2036-2065, RCP4.5), and for the +3 °C period (2051-2080, RCP8.5) in GWh/day.
Weather-VaR (95 %) represents the risk of extraordinarily high electricity demand, i.e. the weather-induced additional amount of electricity consumption that has to be expected once in 20 days.
Details and further information:
Measured in absolute terms, France shows by far the highest decrease in Weather-VaR (95%) for electricity demand. In relative terms (not shown on the map), the highest decrease in Weather-VaR (95 %) for electricity demand is in Sweden and Norway, followed by France. +3 °C further decreases the Weather-VaR (95%) for electricity demand up to -2.8 %-points (compared to +2 °C). A further increase by +3 %-points is determined for Italy.
The non-linear relationship between temperature and electricity demand is estimated by use of smoothed transition models.
Andrea Damm
Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH (JR), Austria