Impacts of temperature, precipitation and population growth on energy demands of Delhi

Abstract

Electricity and energy demand are interlinked with changing weather patterns especially increase in global annual mean temperature, precipitation and population growth. The main aim of present study is to analyze the collective effect of the inducing aspects namely temperature, precipitation, population growth and retrofitting on the heating and cooling energy and electricity demand of households of Delhi for which the data of climate change, population and power & electricity have been used. The demand of power and electricity has a regular increase from Financial Year (FY) 2009- 2010 to FY 2018-2019 with respect to climate change scenario during time period 2010 to 2019 as shown in Table 1, 2 & 3 and Figure 4, which is closely connected with the decadal population growth. The electricity consumption goes up dramatically when the temperature increases in summer and decreases in winter months. Critical need to engage in electricity demand management to boost efficiency in use of electricity to become a low-energy consuming society in the future is the requirement of present time. Further research could explore a broader range of possible future electricity demand and climate change scenarios to capture various uncertainties.