Exploring household electricity consumption patterns through interactive visualizations.
The main question I wanted to explore was: Does our electricity consumption correlate with available daylight? The hypothesis was that consumption would increase during darker winter months (more lights, more indoor entertainment) and decrease during bright summer months.
The radial visualization shows consumption data from 2018-2022 overlaid with daylight hours for Aarhus, Denmark. The visualization reveals:
The result was somewhat surprising: the correlation between daylight and electricity consumption is weak (r = 0.243). While you can observe the rhythm of daylight changes clearly, the consumption data is more erratic. Summer months sit slightly below 10 kWh, winter months slightly above, but the pattern is not as strong as expected.
The hypothesis assumed that lighting and indoor entertainment account for a significant portion of consumption. In reality:
This raises interesting questions about household energy optimization. While we're often told to change habits and implement micro-initiatives for energy savings, the actual potential savings seem minimal – perhaps a couple of kilowatts per day at most.
The visualizations are built using:
The data comes from El Overblik, Denmark's electricity data portal. The visualization code is available in electricity-visualizations.js. The original Observable notebook code is preserved in electricity-visualizations.observable.js.
The underlying data files are available: