Browsing by Author "Janatuinen, Miia"

The electricity sector plays a central role in climate change mitigation and adaptation policies. At the same time, it is also affected by the climate. The ongoing clean energy transition has made the link between electricity sector and weather even stronger since the increasing intermittent renewable energy production is increasingly weather dependent and cannot respond to abrupt changes in demand. Therefore, understanding how the electricity demand reacts to the changes in the climate is crucial for designing policies that support sustainable transition to the net zero economy. The thesis sheds light on these challenges and studies the effects of temperature on the intra-day electricity load in four European countries, Finland, Germany, France and Spain. The research questions are how temperature affects the hourly electricity consumption and whether these effects are different at different hours of the day. The sample consists of data on aggregate hourly electricity load and hourly population weighted temperatures over a period of over 10 years. The hour-specific effects of temperature on electricity load are estimated with a linear regression model of high-frequency fixed effects that allows credible identification of the short-run effects. However, the approach can not address the role of changing behavioural, economic or technological factors which are left for future work. The effects are estimated for each country separately, which also allows to capture the heterogeneity between countries. The results confirm the finding in the previous literature of the non-linear relationship between temperature and electricity load. In particular, electricity load is estimated to be more sensitive to temperature at the extreme temperatures and a comfort zone at which the electricity consumption is estimated to be insensitive to changes in temperatures is found for all countries. However, in Finland and France, the temperature effects are more pronounced at the cold temperatures, whereas in Germany and Spain, the effects are more symmetric. Moreover, in France, Germany and Spain, a comfort zone is estimated to be at colder temperatures in the morning and to shift to warmer temperatures in the afternoon. This implies that, at temperatures approximately between 10℃ and 20℃, heating is more sensitive to changes in temperature at the afternoon hours whereas cooling is more sensitive to changes in temperature at the early morning hours in the three countries. In Finland, the effects of temperature are relatively constant between hours. In conclusion, the results imply that temperatures contribute to the changing dynamics in the electricity sector, affecting both the intra-day variability and the level of the electricity consumption. However, the role of temperatures in these dynamics is relatively moderate.