Sky-Scanning for Energy: Unveiling Rural Electricity Consumption Patterns through Satellite Imagery’s Convolutional Features

Abstract

The pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals has highlighted rural electricity consumption patterns, necessitating innovative analytical approaches. This paper introduces a novel method for predicting rural electricity consumption by leveraging deep convolutional features extracted from satellite imagery. The study employs a pretrained remote sensing interpretation model for feature extraction, streamlining the training process and enhancing the prediction efficiency. A random forest model is then used for electricity consumption prediction, while the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) model assesses the feature importance. To explain the human geography implications of feature maps, this research develops a feature visualization method grounded in expert knowledge. By selecting feature maps with higher interpretability, the “black-box” model based on remote sensing images is further analyzed and reveals the geographical features that affect electricity consumption. The methodology is applied to villages in Xinxing County, Guangdong Province, China, achieving high prediction accuracy with a correlation coefficient of 0.797. The study reveals a significant positive correlations between the characteristics and spatial distribution of houses and roads in the rural built environment and electricity demand. Conversely, natural landscape elements, such as farmland and forests, exhibit significant negative correlations with electricity demand predictions. These findings offer new insights into rural electricity consumption patterns and provide theoretical support for electricity planning and decision making in line with the Sustainable Development Goals.