Impact of climate change on Spanish electricity demand

Abstract

This paper evaluates the influence that climate change could exert on electricity demand patterns in Spain conditioned on the level of warming, with special attention to the seasonal occurrence of extreme demand days. For this purpose, assuming the currently observed electricity demand–temperature relationship holds in the future, we have generated daily time series of pseudo-electricity demand for the recent past and the twenty-first century by using simulated temperatures from statistical downscaling of global climate model experiments. We show that both the frequency and severity of extreme electricity demand days at the national level are expected to increase, even for low levels of regional warming. Moreover, the occurrence of these extremes will experience a seasonal shift from winter to summer due to the projected temperature increases in both seasons. Under a RCP8.5 scenario of greenhouse gas emissions, the extended summer season (June–September) will concentrate more than 50% of extreme electricity demand days by the mid-century, increasing to 90% before the end of the century. These changes in electricity demand have considerable spatial heterogeneity over the country, with northwestern Spain experiencing the seasonal shift later than the rest of the country, due to the relatively mild summer temperatures and lower projected warming there.