E4C: Climate projection of energy demand in France and Europe

The aim of this project (thesis) is to study the future impacts of climate change on heating and cooling needs in Europe and France with a first approach using temperature-based proxies over the whole of Europe and a comprehensive electricity demand model for France and its regions.
The first step in the study was to select a subset of climate models representative of the entire set of available models, which would be both optimal and robust. Thus, we developed an approach for selecting a subset of ten climate models from the multi-model ensemble participating in the CMIP6 intercomparison exercise to assess the impact of climate change on energy demand in Europe. The selection process developed combines two main criteria applied to the average, maximum and minimum daily temperature of all CMIP6 simulations. The first criterion involves selecting a subset of models that represents the full range of possible temperature changes relative to historical climate. The second considers the performance of historical CMIP6 simulations over Europe compared with the ERA5 climatology, in order to eliminate the least realistic climate models over the historical period. The selection methodology preserves the diversity of models in terms of future temperatures among the best-performing models.

The second stage of the study focuses on the impact of climate change on the temporal fragmentation of heating and cooling needs and its implications for the energy system in Europe under four climate scenarios (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5), considering regionalized and corrected CMIP6 simulations on a 25km horizontal resolution grid over Europe and using heating degrees days (HDD) and cooling degrees days (CDD) as proxies.

In the final part of this project, we focused on the case of France to analyze the impact of climate change on electricity consumption and its extremes at national level, and next at regional level in winter and summer. We used a generalized additive model to produce future projections of electricity consumption in France at constant usage.