Smart meters and household electricity consumption: A case study in Ireland

Abstract

Our paper focuses on the electricity consumption in the EU countries and smart meters that are gaining growing popularity and widely used by households and businesses for measuring power consumption and helping to reduce the costs of energy. We use the data collected by the Commission for Energy Regulation in the Republic of Ireland in 2009–2011. The trial included two survey questionnaires (pre-trail and post-trial) administered over the telephone and containing both quantitative data (e.g. Likert scales, dummies, selections, etc.) and open-ended questions. In total, 4232 respondents (individual households) involved in pre-trial and 3423 households involved in post-trial. The second questionnaire was administered 12 months after the first one with the same households participating in the trial. Our methodology involves the implementation of various alternative statistical specifications that allow us to test our hypotheses first by using simple binary form of logistic regression and then by employing its extensions. Our results show that households keen on changing their electricity consumption with the help of smart meters (and perhaps the new, even smarter grids of the future) are also those who would change their consumption patterns in order to have the positive impact on environment. Moreover, it appeared that saving on energy might be more relevant for people who do not have their own place to live and are renting their accommodation. Our findings might be relevant for the stakeholders and policy-makers dealing with setting up the new energy policy framework aimed at tackling the increasing use of energy and energy efficiency and paving the way in the direction of the low-carbon future.

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“…However, the majority of Russian TPP run on fossil fuels with a very little, albeit marginal share of renewables, which is very similar to the situation in the other countries, most notably in the United States (Strielkowski, 2016). The structure of energy and power sector is very important from the point of view of energy dependency and the economic growth of any country (see Štreimikienė, Strielkowski, Bilan and Mikalauskas, 2016;Strielkowski, Štreimikienė and Bilan, 2017;or Rausser, Strielkowski and Štreimikienė, 2018). Some researchers are using mathematical models to take measures of this dependency and to quantity it is using real values (see Brożyna, Mentel, Szetela and Strielkowski, 2018) Just for the sake of the argument, the following comparison can be done.…”

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