Modeling framework for estimating impacts of climate change on electricity demand at regional level: Case of Greece

Abstract

Abstract This paper focuses on the potential upcoming impacts of climate change in the 21st century on electricity demand at regional/national levels for regions where topography and location result in large differences in local climate. To address this issue, a regional climate model, PRECIS, has been used to predict future climatic conditions under different emissions scenarios (namely A2 and B2 of the IPCC special report on emissions scenarios (SRES)) as an input to a multiple regression model of the sensitivity of electricity demand in the Greek interconnected power system to climate and socio-economic factors. The economic development input to the multiple regression model follows the same storylines of the SRES scenarios upto 2100 and includes sub-scenarios to cover larger and smaller economic development rates. The results of the analysis indicate an increase of the annual electricity demand attributable solely to climate change of 3.6–5.5% under all scenarios examined, most of which results from increased annual variability with substantial increases during the summer period that outweighs moderate declines estimated for the winter period. This becomes more pronounced if inter-annual variability, especially of summer months, is taken into consideration. It was also found that in the long run, economic development will have a strong effect on future electricity demand, thus increasing substantially the total amount of energy consumed for cooling and heating purposes. This substantial increase in energy demand with strong annual variability will lead to the need for inordinate increases of installed capacity, a large percentage of which will be underutilized. Thus, appropriate adaptation strategies (e.g. new investments, interconnections with other power systems, energy saving programmes, etc.) need to be developed at the state level in order to ensure the security of energy supply.