Weather can have a profound effect on energy consumption, especially extremes of hot and cold temperatures. These variations in particular drive residential and commercial energy demand because space heating and cooling is such an important component. Traditional approaches are customized to the specific geography of interest. Energy regulators use a measure of divergence from normal temperatures to estimate peaks in demand when planning future capacity, or to strip out short-term weather effects to identify underlying growth trends. Energy traders marry weather forecasts to demand data to identify potential price peaks and troughs. What unites these analyses is that they tend to be either local or short term in nature; or both. However, the customization of methodology to a particular geography renders comparisons of the effects of weather between countries invalid.
Alessandro Lanza
Visiting Researcher Alessandro is a visiting researcher and a professor of energy and environmental policy at LUISS University. He has held the… Alessandro is a visiting researcher and a professor of energy and environmental policy at LUISS University. He has held the positions of deputy head of the Energy and Environment Division of the IEA/OECD, Eni’s chief economist and executive director of the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, and chief executive officer of Eni Corporate University. Alessandro's career has also included working as a researcher at the IEFE and the Joint Research Centre of the European Union at ISPRA, and as a research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. He had the distinction of being lead author for the IPCC Third Assessment Report when IPCC was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize, and for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. More recently Alessandro has been serving on the board of directors of ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development.
