Regional Variations in Energy Consumption of Appliances: Conditional Demand Analysis Applied to Brazilian Households

Estimating the true consumption of appliances in use is important both for modeling and short term forecasting of electricity demand, as well as for planning and assessing Demand Side Management (DSM). This paper applies the new technique known as Conditional Demand Analysis (CDA) to estimate consumption of these appliances. This was made possible due to a major survey carried out for the Brazilian National Electricity Conservation Program by the Brazilian electric utility companies while they were still state owned. Results were checked against traditional appliance energy consumption figures, and investigations carried out to ascertain if differences were due to regional variations in consumption patterns from northern to southern Brazil.