Understanding electricity consumption behaviour through Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Enrico Cofler, Carlos Rodriguez-Pardo, Matteo Giuliani, Andrea Castelletti, Massimo Tavoni
Organizations: Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Via Ponzio 34/5, 20133 Milano, Italy · RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment, Via Solari, 11, 20144 Milano, Italy · Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici, Via Solari, 11, 20144 Milano, Italy · Politecnico di Milano, Via Raffaele Lambruschini 4B, 20156 Milano, Italy · Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale, Politecnico di Milano, Via Raffaele Lambruschini 4B, 20156 Milano, Italy
Abstract
Understanding how households consume electricity in response to socioeconomic and climatic drivers is important for decision-makers designing energy policies in a changing climate and under geopolitical tensions. Consumers respond differently to thermal stress depending on income, consumption habits and the surrounding built environment, a nonlinear behaviour that most approaches oversimplify. In this study, households are treated as agents interacting with complex environments, and Inverse Reinforcement Learning is used to represent their consumption behaviour as model implied reward functions. Specifically, we observe how these reward functions change when households undergo socioeconomic and climatic shocks. The framework is tested on different clusters of electricity consumption profiles in Italy. Clusters' reward functions are retrieved and used to understand how cooling behaviour changes from summer 2021 to summer 2022 and 2023, before, during and after the energy crisis and a heatwave. We find that these shocks reshaped cooling behaviour heterogeneously across consumer groups, in directions conditioned by their prior habits and built environment. Across the 2021 to 2023 summers, we identify a spectrum of responses: transient adjustments that receded as the shocks eased, durable shifts persisting into 2023, and consumers exhibiting negligible change. At the intradaily scale, groups comparable in socioeconomic and environmental context but differing in their daily timing of consumption responded distinctly, identifying time of use as a separate dimension of behavioural heterogeneity. Energy policies and demand-response schemes should therefore account not only for who consumers are and where they live, but for when they consume and whether their response to a shock persists.
Extreme weather and volatile wholesale electricity markets expose residential consumers to catastrophic financial risks, yet demand response at the distribution level remains an underutilized tool for grid flexibility and energy affordability. While a demand-response program can shield consumers by issuing financial credits during high-price periods, optimizing this sequential decision-making process presents a unique challenge for reinforcement learning despite the plentiful offline historical smart meter and wholesale pricing data available publicly. Offline historical data fails to capture the dynamic, interactive feedback loop between an electric utility's pricing signals and customer acceptance and adaptation to a demand-response program. To address this, we introduce DR-Gym, an open-source, online Gymnasium-compatible environment designed to train and evaluate demand-response from the electric utility's perspective. Unlike existing device-level energy simulators, our environment focuses on the market-level electric utility setting and provides a rich observational space relevant to the electric utility. The simulator additionally features a regime-switching wholesale price model calibrated to real-world extreme events, alongside physics-based building demand profiles. For our learning signal, we use a configurable, multi-objective reward function for specifying diverse learning objectives. We demonstrate through baseline strategies and data snapshots the capability of our simulator to create realistic and learnable environments.
Jose E. Aguilar Escamilla, Lingdong Zhou, Xiangqi Zhu +1
The accelerating shift toward low-carbon power systems, together with the widespread adoption of behind-the-meter technologies such as rooftop solar and electric vehicles, is placing new operational and analytical demands on electricity grids. At the same time, smart-grid research increasingly relies on machine learning (ML), yet progress is constrained by limited access to high-resolution household energy data due to privacy concerns, regulatory barriers, and collection costs. This work presents WattCouncil, a data-generation framework in which household electricity demand is generated by a council of Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents operating in specialized roles to generate, audit, and validate structured energy scenarios under explicit cultural, temporal, and physical constraints. Rather than acting as static predictors, these agents serve as adaptive decision-makers within a governed pipeline. Motivated by studies highlighting the importance of contextual factors in energy use, our framework produces context-sensitive daily routines through a guided reasoning process that incorporates household composition, temporal factors, and environmental conditions. We evaluate the generated profiles against the detailed CER dataset, which contains over a year of load measurements for 4232 households together with survey-based socio-economic information. We further assess the consistency of the framework through ablation studies. Source code is available at https://github.com/Singularity-AI-Lab/wattcouncil
Mohannad Takrouri, Nicolas M. Cuadrado A., Martin Takáč
Residential short-term load forecasting (STLF) is challenging because household demand is heterogeneous, temporally variable, and shaped by diverse behavioural routines. This work investigates whether inferred behavioural structure can be embedded within the forecasting mechanism of a Neural Process-based probabilistic model, rather than used only as an external grouping signal, for context-conditioned residential STLF. We propose a behaviour-conditioned Attentive Neural Process framework that treats each load profile as a forecasting task. Behavioural structure is represented by a discrete latent variable inferred from the available context and used for behaviour-conditioned decoder conditioning, while a continuous latent variable captures shared functional uncertainty across heterogeneous profiles. To enable conditioning without ground-truth behavioural labels, clustering-derived information provides weak supervision during training, whereas test-time conditioning relies only on context-inferred class distributions. Experiments on the Smart Grid, Smart City (SGSC) dataset use user-disjoint train/validation/test splits, variable context lengths, and multi-step forecast horizons, with comparisons against a label-agnostic ANP baseline and fixed-window deterministic STLF baselines. The proposed variants improve MAE and CRPS over ANP across horizons and context settings, with the largest gains under limited context. The best-performing variant achieves average reductions of 7.9% in MAE and 6.9% in CRPS relative to ANP. Compared with fixed-window baselines, this variant achieves lower RMSE across all evaluated horizons while maintaining competitive MAE, suggesting fewer large prediction deviations under heterogeneous consumption patterns. These results support single-model, uncertainty-aware forecasting across heterogeneous households, contexts, and horizons.