Open modeling of electricity and heat demand curves for all residential buildings in Germany

Abstract

Energy system modeling has been following the energy transition to investigate challenges and opportunities of future energy systems on all grid levels. Necessary input for sector-coupled energy system models are residential electricity and heat demand curves. The increasing importance of distribution grids and their modeling requires demand profiles in high spatial resolution.This paper presents a method to assign pre-generated electricity and heat demand curves to georeferenced residential buildings in Germany. We aim at overcoming fundamental shortcomings of the Standard Load Profiles and enable new possibilities for the modeling of distribution grids. Our approach provides a large variety in residential load profiles which spatially correspond to official socio-demographic data. All used input data sets as well as implemented methodology and the resulting profiles are publicly available under open source and open data licences to enable further use. Our results are validated on different aggregation levels as well as compared and discussed with the commonly used Standard Load Profiles.