French Public holiday: Bastille Day, 14th July
Bastille Day, aka La Fête Nationale or Le quatorze juillet, commemorates the storming of the Bastille, which took place on 14 July 1789 and marked the beginning of the French Revolution. Bastille Day is a public holiday in France so post offices, banks and many businesses are closed. Unlike holidays in many European countries, when Bastille Day falls on a weekend no time off in lieu is granted. The holiday always falls on the 14th July, no matter what day of the week that happens to be, this year it will be on Monday. We expect the Day of Bastille to have a great effect on electricity demand. Bear in mind though, that weather is still a major driving factor affecting the load. To avoid any weather driven results biasing our analysis we used weather adjusted load.
The last “congruent” year was 2008, although this was a few years ago, what happened then? We think demand behaved much as you might expect, and have incorporated this into our forecast of French national demand for this upcoming weekend.
- The Monday itself looks very much like a Sunday
- Friday sees an earlier than expected ramp down
- Saturday and Sunday are lower than usual weekends
- Tuesday sees a later than expected ramp up
The Friday before the holiday seems to have a slightly different shape than typical Fridays during the summer; being lower between 17.00 and 21.00, as people are going away after work for the 3-day weekend. Supporting this view, we see that the demand on the weekend before Bastille Day is lower than the demand on the weekend after the holiday. Tuesday equally the ramp up occurs later than one would normally expect.
TESLA have incorporated this into the national demand forecast for France for the coming weekend, naturally based on the current weather forecast.