Looking deeper into residential electricity consumption profiles: The case of Évora

In order to stabilize or reduce households' electricity demand while fulfilling energy service needs, preventing harmful environmental impacts and decreasing fossil fuel imports, a growing use of decentralized RES, coupled with energy efficiency programs, is needed. We claim that successful design and implementation of these measures will be achieved by understanding of households electricity consumption patterns using high resolution data from smart metering coupled with the knowledge on socio-economic details. For that purpose we analyzed daily off-peak and total electricity consumption for 2011–2013 from smart meters of 250 households in the city of Évora, for which a 110 questions door-to-door survey is also available. We concluded for significant variations on electricity consumption among different consumers' profiles, following specific socio-economic characteristics. We estimated 12.7MW of PV potential for auto-consumption based on segmented daily minimum consumption. Acquired knowledge can be used to target energy consumption reduction policies and optimize self-consumption capacity investment costs and electricity production surplus.