The AURORA energy tracker app has more than 800 users across five demonstration sites who have input their energy consumption data in three different sectors including electricity, transportation, and heating. Each user receives a ‘label’ showing how their consumption in each sector compares to the average citizen of their demonstration site. With all this data available to us after anonymisation, we can analyse the energy behaviour of citizens across Europe.
How do AURORA users compare to the average citizen in each country?
Looking at our current data, we can see that the average energy consumption of the users (See figure for Spain and Slovenia below) is close to the average energy consumption reported by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission [1]. However, the distribution of the data tells us that most users have a lower consumption than the average, meaning even a small share of the population with very high consumption can make a difference.
Figure 1: Comparison of average energy consumption vs. baseline values for Slovenia and Spain. The three figures to the right at each row show the histogram for one of the three energy sectors.
How do user labels across different countries compare to each other?
There are many users in each demonstration site with A+ labels, which means they are near-zero citizens. Since the number of users is still not statistically significant, we can’t make any firm conclusions about the distributions of other labels in each country. We can only say from an initial analysis that electricity and transportation labels include more A+ labels than the heating sector. This could indicate that while users have found solutions to reduce their electricity consumption or transportation emissions by using public transport, it is harder to reduce heating consumption or find an alternative for the heating source as it is usually not controlled by the citizens.
Figure 2: Energy consumption labels for each category for users in Spain, Slovenia, UK, and Portugal.
Are the users in each country very similar in terms of energy consumption?
Electricity consumption reported through the app is quite consistent and matches national averages, likely because most users can easily access their monthly electricity bills. In contrast, heating and especially transportation, show a wider range of consumption data. This is not surprising since transportation could vary greatly for different groups of citizens such as students, remote workers, full-time workers, and retirees. Heating data is also not as easily accessible in every demonstration site. However, the more users input data (Spain for example has three times as many users than Slovenia), the easier it will be to recognize the outliers in terms of consumption in each sector.
Figure 3: Box plots for energy consumption data for users in Slovenia and Spain.
What heating methods are used in each country?
The heating sector has the lowest number of individual consumptions data from users, most likely due to the difficulty of obtaining the information. The limited datapoints we have indicate that the heating sources in each country are quite different from one another. In Spain, we see a dominance of Natural gas with low shares of electric heating, district heating, liquified petroleum, and even geothermal. For Portugal, a large share of users have reported using biomass as their main heating type, with oil, electric heating, and solar thermal also included in the data. Slovenia has an even more diverse set of heating methods, dominated by biomass and electric heating, but also a noticeable share of natural gas.
Figure 4: Distribution of energy sources, cumulative energy consumption, and cumulative carbon emissions for the heating sector for Spain, Portugal, and Slovenia.
The More Users, the Better!
As more people use the app, we get a clearer picture of diverse energy consumption patterns across different regions. This will eventually help us come up with solutions that citizens can use in their daily lives to reduce their energy consumption and lower their carbon emissions. Want to see what label you’d get and help us out? Try the AURORA app today!
Want to know more?
Interested in our analysis methods or want to do your own? Check out our detailed report, ‘State of the art of Energy Mix, citizens’ behaviours and Environmental Impacts of 5 European Communities‘ which is available online. A previous summary from our summer newsletter is also available online. You can also download the latest anonymized dataset of the AURORA app from the AURORA dashboard and use our open-access Jupyter notebooks (available on GitHub) as a starting point for your analysis.
References
[1] Mantzos, Leonidas; Rozsai, Mate; Matei, Nicoleta Anca; Mulholland, Eamonn; Tamba, Marie; Wiesenthal, Tobias (2018): JRC-IDEES 2015. European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC) [Dataset] doi: 10.2905/JRC-10110-10001 PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/jrc-10110-10001
