Dr Ben Anderson (PI), Professor Abubakr Bahaj

Project description

Most research to date 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 to 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 (Walker 2014; Torriti et al. 2015; Torriti 2017; Grunewald and Diakonova 2018) and to ‘avoid’ expensive peak period pricing (Torriti 2015; Fell 2019).

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 SERL observatory data to analyse habitual patterns of household electricity demand to address the above mentioned knowledge gap.