What is it about?
Temperature impacts our lives every day when we choose what to dress or if we should turn on the air conditioner or the heater. With rising temperatures caused by climate change, we will experience a higher need for space cooling and lower need for heating, in southwestern Europe. Also, we are using more and more electricity to heat our places, as opposed to natural gas. This work talks about this change in our behaviour and how it will increase electricity consumption in the future in Portugal, considering the expected changes in our buildings and climate. We found that our electricity consumption may increase 5 to 60% in 2050, with a decrease of 33% on heating and an increase of 20-fold in cooling.
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Why is it important?
To avoid blackouts, our power system has to keep an accurate balancing between demand and supply at every given time. Thus, it is extremely important to plan wisely the investment in supply sources (photovoltaics, wind, etc.) to guarantee that it is in line with the expected magnitude of electricity demand in the future. For this reason, we should understand the expected development of our electricity consumption.
Perspectives
With the electrification tendency increasing and the rising temperatures expected to southern Europe countries, I believe that understanding how electricity consumption will change is crucial. Particularly, the increase in cooling may potentially jeopardize the security of supply if power systems are not planned to suppress such increasing needs. In this regard, I believe that further research on this topic is crucial to assure a smooth development of a society more and more dependent on electricity.
Raquel Figueiredo
Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Country residential building stock electricity demand in future climate – Portuguese case study, Energy and Buildings, February 2020, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2019.109694.
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