Modeling and analysis of electricity consumption in Spanish vulnerable households

Understanding households’ energy needs is an important 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 investigations, 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 consumption 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 estimate the theoretical consumption required to meet Spanish- households’ electricity needs. On average, the modeled consumption is moderately higher than the actual electricity consumption of the households’ sample considered. This difference increases when considering only the households visited by the NGO, which confirms their vulnerability condition.