Norwegian hourly residential electricity demand data with consumer characteristics during the European energy crisis

This dataset was collected to understand how Norwegian households responded to the electricity price shock due to the European energy crisis. It consists of consumer characteristics and their self-reported responses to the extraordinarily high electricity prices which were collected with a survey of 4,446 consumers. The consumer characteristics contain socio-demographic information, such as income, age, education, number of residents, residence type, residence size, and how conscious the respondents were about their electricity consumption. Furthermore, major electricity-consuming appliances were identified, such as whether the residents had an electric vehicle and how they heated their homes, and if they had a dynamic electricity price contract. In addition, the dataset includes hourly metered electricity consumption data covering October 2020 to March 2022 from a subset of 1,136 residential consumers of the surveyed households, the total hourly residential electricity consumption per Norwegian bidding area from July 2019 to July 2022, and the hourly day-ahead electricity prices. These data are interesting to researchers that aim to gain insight into the electricity consumption behaviour of the residential sector and the impact of different socio-demographic variables.

The online survey was conducted by the market research company Ipsos with a pre-recruited household panel and was limited to the regions of Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, and Tromsø.Hourly electricity consumption data were collected via local grid companies from a subset of the surveyed households.These households consented to share their data in the survey, and a matching entry based on name and address was found in the database of the local grid company for them.Households with consumption patterns that could be identified as outliers were excluded.Aggregated consumption data of all households per bidding area were collected from Elhub, the national database for electricity data.

Value of the Data
• This dataset comprises a substantial amount of hourly metered electricity demand data spanning up to 36 months from households with a large share of dynamic electricity price contracts tied to the hourly spot price.These contracts, alongside the extraordinarily high electricity prices during the observation period, enable an analysis of demand flexibility in households influenced by variable prices.• The dataset encompasses the highest recorded national peak load in Norway to date, rendering it particularly interesting for power system analysis and understanding the contributions of households to peak demand.
• The data presented in this article establish a connection between electricity demand data to consumer characteristics obtained through surveys.These characteristics include sociodemographic variables, households' attitudes and awareness towards their electricity consumption, their primary electricity-consuming appliances such as electric vehicles, and how they responded to extraordinarily high electricity prices.Consequently, these data facilitate investigation of household subgroups.• The data were collected from a real-life context and closely resemble another dataset acquired during a dynamic pricing experiment involving households in the same regions [1] .Thus, the data facilitate comparison of the price responsiveness of households in experimental and real-life settings.• The dataset can be employed to conduct socio-economic analyses required for policymakers to make informed decisions.Economists can explore fairness and welfare distributions of electricity costs for different consumer groups, whereas power system researchers can leverage the dataset to gain insights into price elasticity and demand patterns across consumer groups with different appliances and habits.Additionally, it enables a comparison of the stated preference and revealed preference for responding to high electricity prices.

Objective
The data collection was part of the iFlex project by the Norwegian transmission operator Statnett with the goal of investigating whether, and how, households responded to the extraordinarily high electricity prices in winter 2021/22 [2] .Most Norwegian households have electricity contracts tied to the hourly spot price for their bidding area and thus were exposed directly to these prices.

Data Description
We have divided the data description into two sections.The first describes the nature of the data, whereas the second describes the structure of the table files.

Nature of collected data
The dataset contains four data types: survey answers, individual electricity consumption data, aggregated electricity consumption data, and electricity prices.Norway is divided into five bidding areas, with hourly electricity prices determined by the day-ahead market of Nordpool1 based on the production, consumption, and exchange capacities for each bidding area.The dataset covers these bidding areas, as summarised in Fig. 1 .The following sections describe each data type.

Survey answers
The survey was conducted in four different Norwegian regions, and the number of households answering it is summarised in Table 1 .
The survey contained questions to provide insight into whether the households had reduced their electricity consumption due to the high electricity prices that occurred in the previous winter.Additionally, questions were asked about the customers' type of electricity price contract, electricity consumption and costs awareness, and residence characteristics.These characteristics include building type, size, heating sources, and electric vehicle ownership.Finally, socio-demographic variables such as the number of inhabitants, income, age, and others were also included in the survey.A comprehensive list of the survey questions is provided in Section 4.1.The households included in the dataset exhibit two interesting characteristics: a high share of electric heating and electric car owner ship, as illustrated through the survey answers in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 .

Aggregated electricity consumption
In addition to the individual demand data, the sum of the hourly electricity consumption of all households in each of the five Norwegian bidding areas, as shown in Fig. 1 , are available from July 2019 to July 2022.Since the number of households, i.e., electricity meters, are available in the dataset, the hourly consumption of an average household can be calculated as illustrated in Fig. 5 .

Electricity spot prices
The hourly electricity price for each of the bidding zones are added to the dataset since most of the Norwegian households have electricity tariffs tied to the spot price from the day-ahead market.The extraordinary increase in electricity prices in the bidding areas NO1, NO2 and NO5, which all are in southern Norway, can be seen in Fig. 6 .

Structure of table files
The dataset contains the following comma-separated files, which are described in the following sections:

Households.csv
This file contains an overview of all 4,446 households which answered the survey with information about their location of residence and whether electricity consumption data are available.Each participant has a unique identifier, also used in answers.csvand demand.csv .A detailed description of the columns in the file is provided in Table 2 .

Survey.csv
All households in the dataset answered a survey, and this file contains all questions and possible answer options, both in the original Norwegian version and translated into English.A detailed description of the columns in the file is provided in Table 3 .

Answers.csv
This file contains the answers to the survey of each of the 4,446 households.It is organised in a matrix with households in rows and answers in columns.A detailed description of the columns in the file is provided in Table 4 .

Demand.csv
This file contains the hourly electricity consumption data for households which consented to share their demand data.A detailed description of the columns in the file is provided in Table 5 .

Demand_areas.csv
This file contains the sum of the hourly electricity consumption of all households in each of the five Norwegian bidding areas.A detailed description of the columns in the file is provided in Table 6 .

Experimental Design, Materials and Methods
The survey answers, and the hourly data on electricity consumption and prices, were collected with different methods.The collection methods are described briefly in the following sections.

Survey answers
The questions were derived from a similar survey conducted with Norwegian households one year prior, which was published and described in Ref. [1] .Our survey was conducted from 30

Individual electricity consumption
Historical metered consumption data were collected from the households.It is important to note that these data were not influenced by the survey because, at the time of electricity consumption, the households were unaware that their data would be shared.As part of the survey, we included a question about whether the household consented to share their electricity consumption data, of which 67% or 3,011 households consented.
The electricity data were subsequently extracted by the customers' respective distribution grid companies covering October 2020 to March 2022 and anonymised by assigning each customer a randomised identifier.To ensure privacy, this identifier was connected to the electricity consumption data and survey responses.Consumption data were only received from the grid companies in the regions of Oslo and Bergen.The amount of data was further reduced due to grid companies' inability to match each household that consented to their customer database.This occurred, since the information given in the survey, i.e., name and address, was not always sufficient to identify a unique customer.For this reason, the number of households received was 1,609.
Many households had missing consumption values or several values for some hours.After the data quality was checked and all households with data issues had been removed, the number of the remaining households was 1,161.
In addition, households with unusual consumption values were excluded from the dataset as visualised in Fig. 7 .Four criteria identified the outliers based on three consumption characteristics, i.e., the share of zero values, maximum consumption, and average consumption.The specification of the threshold values was performed graphically, and households with a share of zero values higher than 1%, maximum consumption above 20 kWh/h, or average consumption above 6 kWh/h or below 0.1 kWh/h were excluded.

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.Location of the regions and bidding areas where the data were collected (map is published under Norwegian License for Open Government Data at https://temakart.nve.no/tema/nettanlegg ).

3. 1 . 2 .
Individual electricity consumption The dataset includes the hourly electricity consumption data of 1,136 households from two regions, Oslo, and Bergen, from October 2020 to March 2022.Examples of the available demand data of individual households are shown in Fig. 4 .

Fig. 5 .
Fig. 5. Seasonal (a) and daily (b) demand profiles of an average household in each bidding area based on the aggregated demand data and the number of residential electricity meters.The period which overlaps with the individual consumption data is highlighted in a).

Fig. 6 .
Fig. 6.Electricity prices per bidding area for the observation period illustrated as daily average values based on the hourly values from the dataset.

Fig. 7 .
Fig. 7. Threshold values (dashed line) and excluded households (red dots) for the four exclusion criteria.
© 2023 The Author(s).Published by Elsevier Inc.This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Table 1
The number of survey answers per region and city.

Table 2
Description of the table structure in households.csv.

Table 3
Description of the table structure in survey.csv.

Table 4
Description of the table structure in answers.csv.

Table 5
Description of the table structure in demand.csv.

Table 6
Description of the table structure in demand_areas.csv.This file contains the hourly day-ahead prices of electricity for each of the five Norwegian bidding areas.A detailed description of the columns in the file is provided in Table7.

Table 7
Description of the table structure in prices.csv.