Natural gas consumption and correlation with the uses of thermal energy: Analysis of the Italian case

In this paper, after a brief review of the methodologies proposed in the literature for the forecasting of heat load and thermal energy consumption, a specific analysis of the trends of natural gas consumption applied to the Italian case. Italy is a country in which the use of natural gas can be mainly connected to the uses of thermal energy for heating purposes. The natural gas consumption data are analyzed characterised and clustered referring to the last four years (2012-2015). The dependence of the typical Italian consumption profile in different days of the week, in different seasons and for the different users are analyzed: residential/civil, industrial and use referred to thermoelectric power plants are in particular analyzed. The analysis of the data shows that natural gas consumption profile is mainly related to seasonality pattern and to the weather conditions (in particular temperature below 15 °C) for the civil/residential sector, but it is shown that there is also an important daily pattern both related to industrial and civil energy consumption that, at a lower degree than the previous one, does affect the consumption profile and have to be taken into account for defining an effective short and mid term thermal energy forecasting method. A possible mathematical structure of the natural gas consumption profile is proposed. Due to the strong link between thermal energy use, mainly connected to heating purposes, and natural gas consumption this analysis could be considered the first step for the development of a model for thermal energy forecasting.