Influence of Households’ Energy Demand Variation on the Performance of Household Sustainable Energy Systems

Dutch households consume 20% of the total energy used in the country and therefore targeted by decision makers to reduce their fossil fuel dependence and carbon emission attributed to them (“Energy mix”, 2007; CBS, 2008.). Different technical systems such as solar panel, micro-Combined Heat and Power (micro-CHP), efficient appliance and bulbs, insulators, solar boiler and heat pump can be used for residential households in order to reduce the environmental impact of their energy consumption and to secure energy. These measures are called sustainable energy systems as they either reduce total energy use or generate energy from renewable energy sources such as sunlight, air, geothermal heat, water and etc. The effectiveness of the systems may depend on the way households consume energy and it may not be the same for all households even if they have the same energy demand over the year. Therefore, we questioned that “does households’ energy consumption behavior influence the performance of household sustainable energy systems? If so, what actions should be taken by the government to increase the performance? The aim of the thesis is to investigate whether or not households’ energy consumption behavior influences the performance of sustainable energy systems; and to give recommendation for policy makers on future direction and effective implementation of the systems. The question is addressed by modeling different energy demand patterns. Statistical model, gamma distribution, is used to model different electricity demand pattern for different households that have the same average energy demand but; 1) different electricity consumption variance (high or low) and; 2) different peak demand hours over the day (in daytime or in early morning and in the evening). The performance of a sustainable energy system, solar panel, is then compared between them using performance criteria measures such as electricity bill, money saved, percentage of electricity demand covered from the grid and percentage of solar electricity supply used at home. The result shows that grid dependence and electricity bill increases with increasing electricity consumption variance; however, the difference between high and low consumption variance is very small. Likewise peak electricity demand in early morning and in the evening leads to higher grid dependency and electricity bill compared to households that consume their most energy in the daytime though the difference is small in the Netherlands. The difference in grid dependence and electricity bill due to variation of peak demand hours is higher than the differences due to consumption variance. In general, the effect of energy consumption variation on the performance of solar panel from the considered electricity demand patterns is small in the Netherlands; however this may not be true when the efficiency of solar panel is improved in the future; in other countries that have longer sunny season; for other energy demand patterns not considered in this thesis and for other sustainable systems. Therefore, we recommend further research on these areas. From the current result the government can still reduce the effect of consumption variation either by encouraging technologies that can store energy during low demand time and /or by influencing the behavior of the households. The behavior of the household can be influenced by using incentive or creating awareness about the effect of energy demand variation and by giving recommendation for optimal way of energy consumption like reducing simultaneous use of electrical devices.

Subject

energy demand pattern
household
sustainable energy systems
performance measures
statistical model

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master thesis

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