Analysing the electricity consumers’ attitude with Structural Equation Modeling

Abstract

Demand Side Management (DSM) is a set of measures, policies and strategies sensitive to the electricity consumers’ attitude that is a sum of perceptions and expectations influenced by relevant information, related to the benefits that can change the consumers’ behaviour towards sustainable electricity consumption. Internet access, Pro-environmental measures, Expectations and Relation with supplier are several unobserved factors that impact the Attitude of consumers. The Structural Equation Model (SEM) allows us to identify the latent factors and indicate the directional relationships among these factors that are behind the measured items of questionnaire data. Thus, in this paper we propose to analyse a complex data set from a pre-trial questionnaire with SEM and reveal interesting insights related to latent factors that have the potential to enhance the DSM strategies. For simulations, a complex data set with 4,232 observations and 143 items is considered and several smaller data subsets verify whether the model capitalize on change characteristics of a certain data set or not.