Energy is one of the most vital resources in daily life, and electricity is essential for human activities and progress. Intrinsically, it serves as an indicator of a Nation's economic health. Nonetheless, electric energy is critical to the economies of the countries (Jasiński 2019; Hutasavi and Chen 2021). Forecasting electric energy load is critical for the proper operation of the electric network, which is subject to a set of stringent requirements in the electric power sector. The predictions are also crucial for businesses to make decisions about the production and procurement of energy in the future market, which could consequently have an impact on infrastructure development, operating costs, and energy efficiency (del Real et al. 2020).
Forecasting the demand for electric energy is very challenging, since it depends on several parameters that interact in a complex way, including socioeconomic, corporate, and personal factors. Energy demand may be related to factors such as population growth, demographic factors, income, the number of electrical appliances, the working day, and the time of the day because these interactions occur at various spatial and temporal scales. Forecast models are presently developed based on the time horizon (short, medium, and long term), temporal resolution (hourly, daily, monthly), and spatial resolution (hourly, daily, monthly) (e.g., residence, regional, country level) (Verwiebe et al. 2021).
Since variations in demand are consumers' reactions to weather conditions at a particular time, customers' responses to meteorological variables, particularly air temperature, have a significant influence on energy consumption patterns. Electricity demand fluctuations in tropical countries are generally related to the use of cooling equipment. Temperature is strongly related to electricity consumption, becoming an essential meteorological parameter for the behavior of electrical energy demand because approximately 99% of the energy used for space cooling is electrical (Azevedo et al. 2016; Zhang et al. 2021).
Understanding electricity demand as a function of temperature, it is important not only for forecasting that takes seasonal temperature variations into account, but also for assessing the impact of climate change on energy systems. The effect of rising temperatures on electricity demand extends also to the useful life of concessionaires' equipment, including conservation and replacement planning. This understanding is difficult to grasp because there are feedback processes at play, such as those at the global level where climate change affects the need for electricity for cooling while also having the potential to exacerbate warming by increasing greenhouse gas emissions during the process of producing electricity. On a smaller scale, the urban climate is a complex and distinctive system that is unique to the city, where there are significant changes in temperature, atmospheric circulation, albedo, heat storage, evapotranspiration, and other aspects of the energy balance at the surface. The main manifestation of urban climate, one of the major environmental issues of the twenty-first century, is the urban heat island (UHI), which is characterized by higher temperatures in various urban spaces when compared to non-urban (rural) spaces (Rizwan et al. 2008), due to factors such as atmospheric pollution and flooding.
The UHI is distinguished by three major characteristics: the shape, intensity, and location of its hottest core. These aspects vary depending on the time of day, the season of the year, weather, geographic location, natural morphology such as hills, water bodies, and green areas, and the thermal properties of the materials that make up the city (Voogt 2002). The UHI has been studied using in situ measurements and remote sensing data, sometimes together, sometimes separately, taking advantage of remote sensing's high spatial resolution and in situ measurements' high temporal resolution (Rizwan et al. 2008; Grimmond 2006; Stewart 2011). Several studies have demonstrated the impact and effects of UHI on rising energy consumption in cities (Hwang et al. 2017; Huang and Gurney 2016; Li et al. 2019). UHI intensity has been used to calculate energy usage. It is based on land-surface temperature (LST) data and the quantity of nighttime illumination, both calculated from orbital remote sensing data (Liao et al. 2017).
Light is an electric energy concessionaire that provides 4 million customers across 31 municipalities in the Metropolitan Area of Rio de Janeiro (MARJ). The distribution of electricity in the MARJ is difficult due to high temperatures, which exceed 30°C during the spring and summer months, and systematic energy fraud, which causes significant commercial losses to Light. According to Peres et al. (2018), the variation in UHI intensity in the MARJ is 4.4°C and 7.1°C, respectively, between urban and rural/low-density urban areas and between urban and vegetation areas. In addition, an increase in temperature over time is observed, respectively 1.9°C and 0.9°C, in the two land cover classes in which its customers are concentrated ("urban" and "rural/low urban density").
The study of the relationship between electricity demand and air temperature is critical for efficient energy management by electric energy concessionaires. To properly establish this mentioned relationship, evidencing critical temperature thresholds and including the impacts of UHI, global warming, and extreme weather events caused by climate change (e.g., heat waves), adequate spatial and temporal characterization of the temperature within the study area is required.
As a result, the current work has two main goals:
- Examine how the current network of weather stations is spatially distributed and determine, using cluster analysis, the ideal number of stations to reflect the thermographic behavior of the current UHIs in the Light's concession area (the MARJ), and
- Develop a temperature-dependent load prediction model and validated it for a case study.
Information regarding the LST on the MARJ, which is derived from remote sensing data, specifically from the Landsat series of satellites, is helpful for both objectives. The intensity of the UHI in the MARJ, as calculated by the LST, as well as the locations of pre-existing meteorological stations over the MARJ, are used to define the spatial distribution of the in-situ air temperature monitoring network.