The intensification of extreme weather events represents serious risks for human activities and infrastructures. Climate changes may have adverse effects on electricity generation, transmission and distribution network and energy demand, leading to more and more frequent blackouts, with consequent high costs for people and industries. Here the Italian Electric System has been considered, dealing with the energy production infrastructures and Energy Demand.

The extreme events (Heat Waves, Drought, Floods and Severe Thunderstorms, Cold waves and Wet-Snow) have been investigated by computing some related indicators chosen among the ECCDI indexes using 12 bias-corrected climate projections obtained from high-resolution Euro-CORDEX simulations. These climate hazard indicators have been investigated for the baseline HIST (1971-2000) and two future periods: FUT1 (2021-2050), FUT2 (2051-2080).

The results highlight an exacerbation of the hazards, projected to become more serious in the second part of the century respect to the first one: the heat waves occurrences will likely increase; droughts are expected to become more frequent over time; also severe storms and floods are projected to increase locally. Instead wet-snow events are likely to remain almost unchanged in FUT1 scenario, whereas a slight decrease is expected by 2100 over mountain regions. Finally, cold waves are estimated to decrease in frequency both in FUT1 and FUT2 scenarios.