Influence of climate on household energy consumption per dwelling

See indicator ENER022.

Methodology of calculation : energy consumption with climatic corrections (or climate corrected)

Making climatic corrections enable to measure energy savings or energy efficiency trends that are independent on the year-to-year variations in the winter severity.

The most common method of climatic correction is to calculate a fictive consumption at normal climate in a linear way on the basis of the ratio between the normal degree- days (DDn) and the actual number of degree-days (DD)

(case of ODYSSEE or Eurostat). The “normal” winter is based on a long-term average of degree-days value. Eurostat uses a 25 years average (1980-2004)

The experience shows that this simple method over corrects when winters are much milder than the “normal” winter. In some cases (e.g. in ODYSSEE or Denmark), the correction is only applied to a certain proportion of the space heating consumption k (k=90 %) to account for the fact that some losses are not dependent on the number of degree-days.

      E =   En x K x (DD/DDn) + En x (1-K)

or   En = E x 1/ (1-K x (1-DD/DDn))

with   E : Energy consumption, En : Energy consumption (climate corrected), DD: heating degree days   ; DDn = Heating degree days (25 years average), K= heating share for normal year, or K= r x a with  r = heating share for normal year  and   a = share of heating dependant on degree days (eg 90%)