Realtime temperature-adjusted natural gas savings of European private households: A study on the German gas market in 2022

Natural gas is one of Europe’s main sources of energy and Europe is heavily dependent on imports from foreign countries. Since the imports from the main energy supplier Russia decreased massively due to the war in 2022, European authorities called for savings. Therefore the German Bundesnetzagentur publishes a temperature-adjusted reference consumption to measure these savings in Germany. However, the temperature adjustment is only done by looking for previous days with a similar temperature and using their consumption as a reference value. In this paper, we investigate the natural gas savings of private households for the example of Germany in 2022. We study several alternative filtering and a machine-learning approach to calculate the temperature-adjusted reference consumption. Besides the pure temperature information, we propose to further enrich the data with integral and derivative elements inspired by PID controllers originally stemming from electrical engineering. Our developed framework adaptively adjusting for temperature is new in the literature and may be easily applied to other use cases, such as individual buildings’ consumption, or transferred to variables other than gas consumption.