Estimation of tourism-induced electricity consumption: The case study of Balearics Islands, Spain

Tourism has started to be acknowledged as a significant contributor to the increase in environmental externalities, especially to climate change. Various studies have started to estimate and compute the role of the different tourism sectors' contributions to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These estimations have been made from a sectoral perspective, assessing the contribution of air transport, the accommodation sector, or other tourism-related economic sectors. However, in order to evaluate the impact of this sector on energy use the approaches used in the literature consider tourism in its disaggregated way. This paper assesses the electricity demand pattern and investigates the aggregated contribution of tourism to electricity consumption using the case study of the Balearic Islands (Spain). Using a conventional daily electricity demand model, including data for daily stocks of tourists the impact of the different population growth rate scenarios on electricity loads is also investigated. The results show that, in terms of electricity consumption, tourism cannot be considered a very energy-intensive sector. (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.