| 26 Feb 2026
Open-access energy demand data for South and Southeast Asia
Abstract. Open-access electricity demand data are essential for meteorology–energy and climate–energy research, forecasting, and resilience planning. Yet in South and Southeast Asia (SASEA), such records are fragmented across sources, reported in inconsistent formats, and often difficult to find or access. This is a serious limitation in a region where electricity use and system stress are sensitive to monsoon variability, humid and dry heat, and other natural hazards.
In this paper, we present and describe a harmonised electricity demand dataset for twelve SASEA countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Thailand) at daily national resolution, spanning 2013–2025 with country-dependent coverage. We compiled raw data from national utilities, regulators, and international providers using reproducible retrieval workflows (e.g., APIs and automated scraping of PDFs/XLS/web portals). All records were standardised to megawatt-hours (MWh), and aligned to local-calendar daily totals (i.e., midnight-to-midnight in local standard time).
To support and encourage transparent downstream use, we also provide the raw extracted series, alongside harmonised daily aggregates, metadata, and our processing and scraping scripts. We also publish diagnostics quantifying completeness, gaps, and outliers flagged using a range of statistical methods. Independent validation against Ember monthly electricity demand shows strong agreement in temporal variability for most countries.
Our open dataset will enable regional and cross-country analysis of demand seasonality, growth and variability; evaluation of weather–demand sensitivity using reanalysis or forecasts; and event-based studies of disruption and recovery during extremes. We finish with a short case study application of our dataset and discussion on how it should and should not be used.
This paper presents a harmonized, open-access dataset of daily national electricity demand for 12 countries in South and Southeast Asia (SASEA), covering the period 2013–2025 with country-specific availability. The authors compile data from diverse sources, including national utilities, regulators, and international providers, using reproducible workflows such as APIs and automated scraping. The dataset is standardized to consistent units (MWh) and aligned to local daily totals. They also include diagnostic analyses of data completeness, gaps, and outliers, and validate the dataset against Ember monthly demand data. The resulting dataset offers a valuable resource for studies of electricity demand variability, weather–demand relationships, and energy system responses to extreme events in a data-sparse but climate-sensitive region. Considering the publication, the authors are asked to address the following general and specific comments.
General comments:
Specific comments:
1) On page 4 Fig 1: Abbreviations (e.g., OMN, IND, LKA) are not defined at first occurrence. Please ensure that all abbreviations are clearly defined when first introduced in the text or figures.
2) On page 5 Table 1: The use of the term “country” may not be strictly appropriate in all cases (e.g., Taiwan). The authors are encouraged to revise the terminology throughout the manuscript accordingly.
3) On page 7 Table 2: Table 2 should be relocated to Section 3.3, rather than being placed in Section 4.
4) On page 9 Fig. 2: The current UpSet plot is not easy to interpret. The authors are encouraged to improve the figure design or consider an alternative visualization that more clearly communicates the overlap between outlier detection methods.
5) On page 18 Fig. 9: It is recommended that the colors in the legend be consistent with those of the corresponding curves in the Fig. 9.