The impact of weather variation on energy consumption in residential houses

•There is evidence for significant intraday variation of energy use.•The sensitivity of energy use to weather variation falls via efficiency features.•The sensitivity of energy use to weather depends on the specific time of day/night.•High frequency data helps to accurately model the energy use-weather relationship.

This paper studies the impact of weather variation on energy use by using 5-minutes interval weather–energy data obtained from two residential houses: house 1 is a conventional house with advanced efficiency features and house 2 is a net-zero solar house with relatively more advanced efficiency features. Our result suggests that energy consumption in house 2 is not as sensitive to changes in weather variables as the conventional house. On average, we find that a one unit increase in heating and cooling degree minutes increases energy use by about 9% and 5% respectively for house 1 and 5% and 4% respectively for house 2. In addition, our findings suggest that non-temperature variables such as solar radiation and humidity affect energy use where the sensitivity rates for house 2 are consistently lower than that of house 1. Furthermore our result suggests that the sensitivity of energy use to weather depends on the season and specific time of the day/night.