Island of Ireland: Electricity Demand Trends 2019–2022

Given the free availability of usage data from the Irish grid, I looked to see if there have been any noticeable demand differences YOY. The results point to some notable trends. I ignored 2020 and 2021 due to COVID.

For comparability, I took the month of October 2019 and compared it with October 22. I just took 21 days in the month to avoid impacts from the clocks going back and to ensure we hadn’t any “day of week” or bank holiday effects introducing noise into the data.

A couple of quick observations:

1) Demand has increased by 3.6% in three years. There is a lot to unpick though in that average.

2) The peak time per day 19:15- 19:30 is the same for both years. At the peak time usage was virtually unchanged between 2019 and 2022 (+0.7%) — not a bad outcome if you are managing the network supply.

3) Minimum usage was at 4:00–4:15 in 2022, same as demand in 2019. However night-time usage is up a lot since 2019 (8%)

4) Obviously, it is not a good thing that power demand has increased. However, it should be said that if demand must go up, it is better to see it increasing at favourable times, when there is generation capacity. The nighttime surge my be due to EVs, grid batteries or the impact of data centres (a big deal on the Irish grid). The relative moderation of peak time demand may be the result of Smart tariffs. It would be useful to know.