Recent trends in urban electricity consumption for cooling in West and Central African countries

Thanks to a new non-stationary analytical framework, we estimate the factors that explain the day-to-day and long-term variability of the per-capita electricity consumption in twelve cities of West and Central Africa, especially its sensitivity to weather. Whatever the local climate, temperature is an important driver and explains from 25% to 70% of the variability. The percentage contribution of temperature to the annual consumption is often greater than 20%. Air humidity is another important factor, especially in Sahelian cities where its seasonality is large. It explains up to 6.8% of day-to-day consumption variability in Dakar. The thermal sensitivity is significantly lower than that in OECD countries but when normalized by the base consumption, it is similar. Each additional degree of temperature produces a 3–4% increase in the base consumption in Mindelo and Dakar, 6–10% in most Sahelian and tropical cities. The percentage consumption increase induced by air humidity can be also significant: in Sahelian and some tropical cities, a 10% increase in air humidity roughly corresponds to 70% of the percentage consumption increase induced by a 1 °C increase in temperature (30–90% depending on the city). For most cities, the base consumption and the normalized weather sensitivities are significantly increasing over time, making the electricity demand behavior highly non-stationary.