Development of methodology for estimating electricity use in residential sectors using national statistics survey data from South Korea

This study proposed a methodology for estimating the current and future electricity use in residential sectors in South Korea. Such amounts are reflected by changes in occupants' lifestyles, and can be detected using national statistics survey data. At first, the representative family types, including the number of family members and the attribution of family members were defined, and each family member's daily activities was scheduled by the statistics survey data. Then, estimations were performed by connecting the each occupant activities to the corresponding residential appliances. The estimated annual electricity use obtained from the statistics data was 3677 kWh/year for a household comprised of a four-member family, 3061 kWh/year for a household comprised of a three-member family, and 2913 kWh/year for a household comprised of a two-member family, respectively. The estimated annual electricity use showed 8% difference, on average, as compared to the residential annual electricity use of energy-efficiency design criteria in South Korea, and 16% difference, on average, compared to approximately 1500 actual examples of residential annual electricity use in Seoul, South Korea. The reason for these differences could be that the proposed methodology only estimated the electricity use for weekdays, without including weekends, holidays, and vacations. Further development of this methodology will be required to account for these differences.