An approach to discover the potential for demand response in the domestic sector

Deregulation of the electricity market and electronic metering led to the emergence of retail activity. In particular, the residential sector is the most challenging for demand side management, because the benefits are not immediate for consumers. However, the benefits of the potential increase in efficiency of the residential sector are widely recognized. Fears of the risks for the consumers resulting from tariff deregulation, the lack of widespread infrastructure of individual measurement, but also the intrinsic characteristics of the residential sector explain why the majority of consumers are not exposed to real time pricing or other dynamic economic or technologic schemes of demand side management. The work here presented aims to gather information about how the consumers use electricity. Based upon a small scale quasi-experiment, this paper looks to understand whether it is possible to single-out patterns of consumption, identifiable by the electricity consumption signature consistent across the sample. Fourier analysis puts in evidence common periodicities in the data, while factor decomposition aggregates groups of variables: hours of the day. The information extracted from the analysis will be confronted by consumers for an assessment on how far the interpretation is from the actual behavioral trends.