Comparison between energy consumption and heating degree days (HDD). Projections to 2050 of HDD in different climate scenarios

In January 2016, on the initiative of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, a working table was set up on the topic of the decarbonisation of the economy, with the participation of more than 70 representatives of public administrations, research bodies, public and private bodies, universities, active on the topic of climate change and energy planning. The working table was organized in working groups, one of which dedicated to non-technological input data, aiming at reinforcing a data base shared between all the actors involved in the table, functional to the elaboration of energy scenarios.

This technical report is a result of such collaborative process. It describes the work carried out by the subgroup HDD/CDD, set up to respond to the need to improve the input data referred to the heating degree days and cooling degree days, as part of the refinement of non-technological input data.

The Heating Degree Days (HDD) index shows the heating needs of homes in a certain location in a given period. HDD are calculated as the cumulative sum of the positive differences between the base internal temperatures and the average outdoor temperatures.

In this study we tried to verify the correlation between the heating energy demand and the degree days, in order to provide an estimate of the heating demand in the civil sector (residential and tertiary). The correlation was strong in the E (r = 0.92) and D (r = 0.97) climatic zone types, and quite strong in the B (r = 0.71) climatic zone type. The energy consumption data used does not consider the contribution of biomass: for this reason disaggregated consumption data referred to the national territory is not available at the moment.

To complete the study, projections of the heating degree days were estimated for five future thirty-year periods of interest up to 2050, within two RCP (Representative Concentration Pathways) climate scenarios of the IPCC (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) starting from the anomalies provided by the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change (CMCC).

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