How is electricity consumption in Belgium going to evolve up to 2025 given the current COVID crisis and the expected economic recovery?

As the Belgian Transmission System Operator (TSO), Elia is responsible for the security of electricity supply. Every year, the need for a strategic reserve for electricity production is assessed by Elia, based on a variety of parameters, among which the total electricity consumption in Belgium. In 2020, Climact has helped Elia in determining the short-term evolution of the electricity consumption in Belgium (2020-2025).

In this mission, Climact has helped Elia in determining the short-term evolution of the total electricity consumption in Belgium using the Belgian Calculator being developed for the Federal Public Service Health, Food chain safety and Environment. This tool allows to construct a factual scenario for electricity consumption based on transparent assumptions over societal and technological evolutions and open-source modelling.

In the framework of this mission, the tool has been upgraded in order to account for the impact of macro-economic trends (demography, evolution of the income, of the added value in activity sectors) on the electricity consumption.

The outcome of this mission is a short-term (2020-2025) total electricity demand scenario, disaggregated by sector (buildings, transport, industry,…) and end-use (heating, ventilation, electric vehicles,…) that is going to be published online by Elia in the course of August 2020.

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