Fidelis,

This is a fairly established area of work in India, since we have major diversity between culture and community practices. You should be able to get a lot of publications and reprts related to studies in this country.

Hope that helps.

-Sanjay

I do not think this matter can be related to local culture. If people are educated enough about the benefits of any introduced new device or technology they will be far happy to adopt and use specially if it saves time and money for them.

To answer this question, you need to perform an empirical / field study and collect data that can used to establish a correlation between electricity consumption and people's habits. To do this, you can design a survey questionnaire with targeted questions on how people use electricity at their homes and whether they employ simple technologies such as motion detection sensors that automatically turns power on or off based on room occupancy. Also, what time of the day they turn on electric appliances such as dishwashers, dryers, etc. You'll also need to establish a baseline household equipped with all smart technologies to manage electricity usage. You can then benchmark actual household's electricity usage versus the controlled household (your benchmark).

To have additional information, you should visit this website of MECON project.

Our project focuses on the new modern energy consumers to identify the opportunities and barriers to the adoption of energy efficiency technologies. I think it will be useful for you.

We defined the new modern energy consumers are the household connected to the electricity grid, but with low level daily income, who will be responsible for a large share of expected increase in energy demand and thus GHG emissions in the future. 

Hope you will found some interesting information.

http://meconproject.com

 Dear colleagues

I thank you all for your academic contributions in the subject area. All your inputs were informative. 

Yes to some extent. The reason is based on the content of your question which is on energy consumption. In some societies, the people use less energy in the night for lighting which might be related to their belief. On the other hand, some people has no control on how they should use the energy available to them. I guess a survey will help prove the hypothesis. 

I think it is the issue of load profile. It is site dependant, for it should take into account field constraints. Data collection is hence strongly recommended.

There are certainly cultural events or religious ceremonies that could influence energy consumption levels - the example of the Indian Festival of Lights springs to mind.  However, I believe that there is a stronger correlation between household income and energy consumption, rather than cultural or religious components.  There is research that shows a correlation between income and energy consumption and this is strongest in developing nations.

A large empirical survey would be needed to determine if culture or religion has a strong impact on energy consumption amounts - stronger than income levels.  Culture or religion may impact patterns of consumption, but I would opine that they would have less impact on the total amount.

In addition to this, it is worth considering the impact of energy efficient technologies.  Culture, religion or income will influence what energy is used for - in other words, the services it provides.  But the technology employed will influence how much energy is needed.  An example is a light globe: the service is illumination.  But an incandescent globe can use 10x more energy than an LED globe.

I believe culture or religion has a great impact as well as cultural events. In some regions for instance the consumption of an average family (5 people) might differ because of many reasons: men for instance do not share the same house with women, women and children go to bed very early in order to wake up early the next day, certain thinks are allowed for men and not for women, it is not allowed to switch on the light in the sleeping room, people should pray every day very early in the morning...ect. I believe there are less restrictions in other regions, leading to different load profile

Energy consumption in homes, influenced by many factors: consideration me energy education and habits that have significant influence , this may be favored by the educational level of the family

 Actually many social factors influence the energy consumption behavior.

We have hourly consumption data for 80% of the building stock in Stockholm. While I can not share the database, here are some preliminary insights.

As an example families with small children do more laundry.

Other factors include time of day for eating, doing dishes, taking showers etc. In Stockholm there is an work day consumption peak in the morning between 7-9 AM and an afternoon peak at 5-7 PM. In Sweden, people eat dinner early, and I guess that these peaks would look different in for example southern Europe where people have other eating habits.

During weekends, the morning peak is instead spread out from 7-10 AM as people sleep longer during weekends

Fabian, Thanks for your lucid answer I may understand that when developing energy saving policies for household system the factors in question must  constitute the denominators.

Consumption of electricity depends on the geographical location, culture of the human resource, climate condition, etc. To witness this an example which I would like to provide is that, as we are situated in southern part of India where maximum of forest location and the small tray of water flows from top of hill to downwards and the same has been used for producing electricity in decentralized location. Earlier the locals were used it only for field work, and drinking purpose, now with the help of local technological assistance they could able to use it for dual function. Now they are happy and they have established the same culture to there neighbors as they were following both culture and technology together.