Modeling and analysis of electricity consumption in Spanish vulnerable households

Abstract

Understanding households’ energy needs is an im-portant matter in the fight against energy poverty. The studies carried out so far in Spain have analyzed the domestic electricity demand, but most of them have not validated it with field inves-tigations, and there is no work specifically for vulnerable house-holds. Thus, the study reported in this paper proposes a bottom-up model to characterize Spanish residential electricity con-sumption and applies it to an NGO’s households-database. This versatile model considers typical electrical appliances and key household parameters, i.e. dwelling and household size, to esti-mate the theoretical consumption required to meet Spanish-households’ electricity needs. On average, this theoretical con-sumption is moderately higher than the actual electricity con-sumption of the households’ sample considered. This difference increases when considering only the households visited by the NGO, which confirms their vulnerability condition.