Characterization of Household Electricity Consumption in Uruguay

This article presents a study to characterize the electricity consumption in residential buildings in Uruguay. Understanding residential electricity consumption is a relevant concept to identify factors that influence electricity usage, and allows developing specific and custom energy efficiency policies. The study focuses on two home appliances: air conditioner and water heater, which represents a large share of the electricity consumption of Uruguayan households. A data-analysis approach is applied to process several data sources and compute relevant indicators. Statistical methods are applied to study the relationships between different relevant variables, including appliance ownership, average income of households, and temperature, and the residential electricity consumption. A specific application of the data analysis is presented: a regression model to determine the consumption patterns of water heaters in households. Results show that the proposed approach is able to compute good values for precision, recall and F1-score and an excellent value for accuracy (0.92). These results are very promising for conducting an economic analysis that takes into account the investment cost of remotely controlling water heaters and the benefits derived from managing their demand.