Joint and conditional dependence modelling of peak district heating demand and outdoor temperature: a copula-based approach

This paper examines the complex dependence between peak district heating demand and outdoor temperature. Our aim is to provide the probability law of heat demand given extreme weather conditions, and derive useful implications for the management and production of thermal energy. We propose a copula-based approach and consider the case of the city of Bozen-Bolzano. The analysed data concern daily maxima heat demand observed from January 2014 to November 2017 and the corresponding outdoor temperature. We model the univariate marginal behaviour of the time series of heat demand and temperature with autoregressive integrated moving average models. Next, we investigate the dependence between the residuals' time series through several copula models. The selected copula exhibits heavy-tailed and symmetric dependence. When taking into account the conditional behaviour of heat demand given extreme climatic events, the latter strongly affects the former, and we find a high probability of thermal energy demand reaching its peak.