Scenarios of future Indian electricity demand accounting for space cooling and electric vehicle adoption

TL;DR

This paper introduces a regression model to project India's future electricity demand considering air conditioning and electric vehicle adoption, providing detailed scenarios for infrastructure planning up to 2050.

Contribution

It presents a novel bottom-up regression approach for detailed, hourly, and spatially customizable electricity demand projections incorporating key growth drivers.

Findings

Projected electricity demand scenarios up to 2050

Detailed hourly and spatial demand data sets

Insights into impact of technology adoption on future demand

Abstract

India is expected to witness rapid growth in electricity use over the next two decades. Here, we introduce a custom regression model to project electricity consumption in India over the coming decades, which includes a bottom-up estimate of electricity consumption for two major growth drivers, air conditioning, and vehicle electrification. The model projections are available at a customizable level of spatial aggregation at an hourly temporal resolution, which makes them useful as inputs to long-term electricity infrastructure planning studies. The approach is used to develop electricity consumption data sets spanning various technology adoption and growth scenarios up to the year 2050 in five-year increments. The aim of the data is to provide a range of scenarios for India's demand growth given new technology adoption. With long-term hourly demand projections serving as an essential input for electricity infrastructure modeling, this data publication enables further work on energy efficiency, generation, and transmission expansion planning for a fast-growing and increasingly important region from a global climate mitigation perspective.