Socio-Demographic insights on urban building energy consumption
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Residential buildings are central to global decarbonization efforts, accounting for nearly 40 % of energy use and around 30 % of greenhouse gas emissions. While technological improvements–such as efficient appliances, retrofits, and demand-side management (DSM) programs–are widely promoted, heterogeneity in occupant behaviour remains a major source of consumption variability. Socio-demographic characteristics shape these behaviours, yet their influence on residential electricity use at urban scales remains insufficiently quantified. This study examines how socio-demographic factors drive long-term and short-term electricity consumption patterns across urban neighbourhoods in Québec, Canada. Using hourly electricity data linked with census-derived socio-demographic variables, the analysis proceeds in two phases. First, long-term heating-related behaviour is modelled through change-point analysis, and its associations with socio-demographic attributes are quantified using XGBoost regression with SHAP interpretation. Second, short-term behavioural patterns are assessed by clustering daily load profiles and predicting cluster membership through an XGBoost classification model, again interpreted using SHAP. Results show that income, household size, age structure, employment levels, and housing characteristics significantly influence both structural heating behaviour and daily load shapes. Higher-income and more densely occupied areas display elevated base loads and steeper heating slopes, while lower-income neighbourhoods exhibit earlier heating activation, suggesting reduced efficiency or comfort constraints. Daily load variability is strongly shaped by mobility and work routines: car-dependent and full-time working populations show pronounced morning and evening peaks, whereas neighbourhoods with higher unemployment or walkability exhibit flatter profiles. Aging populations and smaller households sustain higher per-capita use, likely due to longer occupancy durations and comfort-driven heating practices. These findings demonstrate that electricity demand is shaped not only by building attributes but by socio-economic realities and behavioural norms. Embedding socio-demographic diversity into urban energy models provides actionable insights for targeted retrofits, behaviour-sensitive DSM initiatives, and equitable energy policy design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".