Modeling the effect of climate change on Qatar's electricity demand to the end of the century and implications for CO2 emissions from electricity generation

Qatar is one of the country with the highest electricity demand per capita, with a consumption of 16.6 MWh/capita in 2018 while the world average for the same year is 3.3 MWh/capita. This is due both to the hot climate, and therefore a high demand for air conditioning and to the government’s policy of heavily subsidizing electricity. Qatari people are thus not encouraged to reduce their electricity consumption. The subject of the study presented here is to understand the evolution of electricity demand as a consequence of the expected temperature increase by developing a statistical model based on data. In the model we take into account the effect of temperature with a second order polynomial relationship between temperature and electricity demand established electricity consumption and temperature data in Qatar for the year 2016. As we are modeling the total electricity demand, we also consider the effect of the size of the population and the GDP (with linear relationship between population or GDP and electricity demand). The projections were done for 4 Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) with 10 models for each SSP. We worked with SSP1, the road for sustainability, SSP2, the middle of the road, SSP3, regional rivalry and SSP5, fossil-fueled development. Results of our model show that depending on the SSPs, peak demand will be reach between 2060 (SSP1) and 2100 (SSP3), and the intensity of the demand varies from simple (SSP1 with a demand of 1.5 MWh at its peak) to triple (SSP5 with 4.5 MWh at its peak).
As electricity generation in Qatar comes almost a 100% from fossil fuels (natural gas), it releases a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. The second goal of this study is to quantify those CO2 emissions. This was done simply by multiplying the electricity demand with an emission factor for electricity generation specific to Qatar. Our model make it possible to distinguish the contributions of the different effects (from temperature, population and GDP). Those different contributions were calculated by making varying only one of the three factors while keeping the others constant. Our results show that the temperature effect is almost the same for each SSP and account for one fifth of the CO2 emissions. What really makes the difference in the final total CO2 emission on the period 1980 - 2100 is, in our model, the effect of the evolution of the GDP.