Investigators: Dr Ben Anderson (@dataknut), Prof Abubakr Bahaj

Researchers: Dr Tom Rushby

ECCD are conducting a new research project on habitual energy consumption as part of the Smart Energy Research Laboratory.

Most research to date, including ECCD’s previous ESRC-funded Census2022 project, has analysed the shape of daily (24 hour) demand profiles and sought to understand which kinds of households have similar daily demand patterns and why these shapes vary household.

However very little if any research has been conducted on longer-run analysis of habitual electricity demand over periods of weeks or months. The extent to which household demand is habitual has implications for how much it can be temporarily or even permanently reduced or shifted to avoid costly system peaks and to ‘avoid’ expensive peak period pricing. It is likely that 7 days cycles of demand exist due to repeating household practices (Mondays are like Mondays) but with seasonal variation and interruptions (e.g. holidays). However, we do not know the extent to which these daily or even half-hourly repetitive cycles exist, nor which kinds of households may exhibit different degrees of repetitiveness and whether there are regional variations.

In response, this project will use half-hourly smart meter gas an electricity data from the 10,000 households in the SERL observatory data to analyse habitual patterns of household electricity demand to address this knowledge gap.