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Assessing Californians’ awareness of their daily electricity use patterns

Nature Energy volume 7, pages 1191–1199 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

The timing of electricity consumption is increasingly important for grid operations. In response, households are being encouraged to alter their daily usage patterns through demand response and time-varying pricing, although it is unknown if they are aware of these patterns. Here we introduce an energy literacy concept, 'load shape awareness', and apply it to a sample of California residents (n = 186) who provided their household’s hourly electricity data and completed an energy use questionnaire. Choosing from four prominent load shape designations, half of respondents (51%) correctly identified their dominant load shape before COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) orders while only one-third (31%) did so during SIP orders. Those aware of their load shape were more likely to have chosen evening peak, the most frequent dominant shape in the electricity data. Our work provides proof of principle for the load shape awareness concept, which could prove useful in designing energy conservation interventions and helping consumers adapt to an evolving energy system.

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Fig. 1: Questionnaire with response choices for perceived weekday electricity use patterns.
Fig. 2: Before- and during-SIP comparison using perceived load shapes.
Fig. 3: Before- and during-SIP comparison using observed dominant load shapes.
Fig. 4: Summaries of daily household load shapes before and during SIP.
Fig. 5: Load shape awareness among participants.
Fig. 6: Perceived and observed dominant load shape comparison before and during SIP.

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Data availability

The complete data analysed in the current study are not publicly available due to ethical restrictions and privacy of participant information. However, de-identified versions of the data are made available through the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/4jxcm/ and https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4JXCM.

Code availability

The code that supports analysis using de-identified versions of the data are made available through the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/4jxcm/ and https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4JXCM.

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Acknowledgements

We thank members of the Stanford Sustainable Systems Lab and participants in the Designing Your Energy Lifestyle programme for their input in conceptualizing this research. This research was supported by the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Smart & Connected Communities Program (NSF award number 1737565) (H.B. and R.R.) and CAREER (NSF award number 1554178) (R.R.). This work was also supported by Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy (R.R.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Chad Zanocco, Tao Sun, June Flora & Ram Rajagopal

  2. School of Public Policy, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Gregory Stelmach & Hilary Boudet

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Ram Rajagopal

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  1. Chad Zanocco
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  2. Tao Sun
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  4. June Flora
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Contributions

C.Z., H.B., J.F. and R.R. conceptualized and designed the research; C.Z., T.S. and G.S. performed the research and analysed data; C.Z., H.B. and T.S. wrote the initial paper draft; C.Z., H.B., T.S., J.F., G.S. and R.R. reviewed and edited the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Chad Zanocco, Ram Rajagopal or Hilary Boudet.

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Nature Energy thanks Karlijn van den Broek, Philipp Grunewald and Ulf Hahnel for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Notes 1–4, Tables 1–6 and Figs. 1–3.

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Zanocco, C., Sun, T., Stelmach, G. et al. Assessing Californians’ awareness of their daily electricity use patterns. Nat Energy 7, 1191–1199 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-022-01156-w

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