Spatial Estimation of Electricity Consumption Using Socio-demographic Information

Electric power consumption is known at fine temporal scales (e. g. hourly) for geographical zones corresponding to the electric network service divisions (e. g. substations). In several applications, there is a strong need to estimate the past or to forecast future consumption at different divisions, for example the town, district or city block levels. The deployment of smart meters only gives a partial answer to this problem because they usually do not provide exhaustive measures at such temporal scales. We propose in this paper a generic approach to estimate electric consumption on any geographical zones from source zones where fine-grained consumption data is available, using in addition socio-demographic information. The approach is evaluated on both real and simulated data.