Real-time estimates of Swiss electricity savings using streamed smart meter data


Date

2025-01-01

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

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Data

Abstract

The gas crisis of 2022 put pressure on electricity prices in Europe, prompting the Swiss government to launch a national energy-saving campaign. To effectively quantify potential savings and guide timely decision-making, this campaign called for rigorous near-real-time modeling of changes in electricity consumption habits. The proposed approach estimates national electricity consumption at an hourly resolution across three consumer categories using thousands of streamed smart-meter load curves. These curves are aggregated to produce a national consumption estimate using scaling factors that account for differences among Swiss distributors. These factors are derived by regressing historical annual consumption against public socio-economic variables. The obtained national load curve is adjusted for the influence of weather conditions, the calendar and global trends, in order to compare different periods with a reference scenario. Such external effects are modeled with splines using Generalized Additive Models, trained on a 5-year dataset, to precisely measure each contribution on the national consumption and evaluate the consumers’ response to the saving plan. The results indicate a reduction of approximately 4.8% of the adjusted electricity consumption during winter 2022–2023, equivalent to an average monthly savings of 246 GWh, distributed across residential, service, and industrial sectors.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Volume

377

Pages / Article No.

124537

Publisher

Elsevier

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Energy policy; Energy saving; Smart meters; Generalised additive models

Organisational unit

09752 - McKenna, Russell / McKenna, Russell check_circle
02286 - Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) / Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC)

Notes

Funding

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