Analyzing Energy Usage on a City-scale using Utility Smart Meters

Abstract

Understanding the energy usage of buildings is crucial for policy-making, energy planning, and achieving sustainable development. Unfortunately, instrumenting buildings to collect energy usage data is difficult and all publicly available datasets typically include only a few hundred homes within a region. Due to their relatively small size, these datasets provide limited insight and are insufficient for analyses that require a larger representation, such as an entire city or town. In recent years, utility companies have installed advanced electric and gas meters, i.e., "smart meters" that enable energy data collection on a massive scale. In this paper, we analyze such a dataset from a utility company that includes energy data from 14,836 smart meters covering a small city. We conduct a wide-ranging analysis of the city's gas and electric data to gain insights into the energy consumption of both individual homes and the city as a whole.