Quantifying the Cost of Cooling in Qatar

Over the last decade, the electricity demand in Qatar has grown more than twofold. The residential sector is predicted to be responsible for two-third of the entire demand while air conditioning represents a substantial portion of the domestic electricity consumption. One of the grand challenges in Qatar, as in the GCC as well, is to reduce the electricity consumption and to improve the energy efficiency. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze and quantify the consumption patterns for different activities. In this paper, we estimate the electricity cost of air conditioning in Qatar based on the comparison of seasonal electricity consumption data. First, we collect high-resolution electricity data for one year (December 2015 - November 2016). Next, by following the literature we determine the cooling degree days (CDD) in which the average temperatures are higher than 18.3°C and air conditioning is assumed to be running. Then, the load curves for cooling demands are obtained by subtracting the load curves of the average of noncooling days (nCDD) from the CDD load curves. Next, we calculate the correlation between the heat index and cooling demand as 95%. The high correlation confirms that the resultant curves represent the cooling load with a reasonably high accuracy. Moreover, we calculate the annual demand for cooling as 14.675 TWh, which constitutes around 36 % of total annual electricity consumption. This, in turn, translates into a total cost of 1.467 billion USD per year using the average cost of electricity assumptions. Such results are critical inputs to design right policies for demand-side management and energy efficiency programs to and curb the undesired effects of energy generation, distribution and usage including hazardous emissions, air quality degradation, public health expenses, and lost economic opportunities.