Investigating regional electricity consumption across Europe: a spatial analysis

Abstract

Electricity is increasingly central to Europe's energy transition, but evidence on regional consumption remains limited by the lack of harmonised sub-national data. We address this gap by constructing a regional electricity consumption dataset covering all EU Member States and several non-EU countries. The empirical analysis focuses on 232 regions in 27 European countries over 2021–2023. Using spatial autocorrelation statistics, geographically weighted regression (GWR), multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) and coefficient-based clustering, we find that electricity consumption per capita is spatially clustered and that its associations with socioeconomic and climatic variables vary across regions and spatial scales. These findings support a territorial perspective in EU energy and climate policy.