"E" as in Euro2020 (and its impact on electricity consumption)

"E" as in … Euro2020. A day to remember, 11 July 2021. The evening of the Italy- England final of the European football championship at Wembley, finished, as we know, with a victory for the Italian team. A special night also for those who, like Terna’s "azzurri", are responsible for managing the electricity grid and therefore forecasting consumption trends. The forecasts are broken down for each minute of the day and the resulting data are decisive for balancing energy supply and demand.

Sometimes, however, unpredictable elements intervene abnormally altering the consumption curve, deviating it from the expected path. Usually, these unforeseen events are weather-related - cold or hot spikes - but they can also occur under more curious circumstances. Like the European Football Championship final.

On the evening of 11 July, while the Italian national team were busy beating the English at Wembley, electricity consumption in Italy deviated more than usual from the expected trend. Emilio Ghiani, associate professor of Electrical Systems for Energy at the University of Cagliari, noticed this and posted the most significant figures on Linkedin: "The prediction error of the daily load does not exceed on average 1,000 MW (2.5%) - wrote the professor, citing data from the Terna platform Transparency Report - but on the day of the Italy-England final of Euro 2020 in London, the maximum prediction error was 1,940 MW (about 5%), mainly due to the increase in consumption (unforeseen and almost unpredictable) related to the anticipation of domestic activities before sitting down on the sofa to cheer on Italy."

We reached him on the phone to find out more and Ghiani explained that "the deviation is not due to the televisions as such, which now consume very little, but to the fact that we were all at home consuming energy at the same time: maybe taking a shower with water heated by the heat pump, making dinner with the induction cooker or with the air conditioner on...".

Mind you, we are not talking about a real peak in consumption, and in any case "companies like Terna are totally capable of managing deviations of this type - continues the professor - but the difference compared to the forecast was still significant, if you think that 2,000 MW correspond more or less to the consumption of a city like Milan.

The point is that "no one could have predicted that Italy would reach the final: we found out a week before - concludes Ghiani - and it is obvious that these variables are not considered among those used by the algorithms for predicting the electrical load. We are also experiencing this with the heat of these days at the end of July: forecasts are made on average seasonal temperatures, but then it happens that the thermometer reaches 40 degrees with suffocating levels of humidity and people use their air conditioners much more than usual. Again an unforeseen and imponderable factor, but not unmanageable, which drives us, both at the academic level and as operators of the national electricity system, to think of new procedures for processing even external variables, in a time "close to real-time", to improve electricity demand forecasts and thus also reduce imbalances on the electricity grid and the technical and economic costs of handling them".

That’s how football can affect - when such a hard-fought final is being played - a nation's consumption.