Looking at my electric bill, there’s a section saying “this percent came from [ex: Air conditioner, major appliances (fridge, oven), etc]”. How do they know that?
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Some of these answers are close, but not completely accurate. I create and implement energy policy, and have a lot of background with this exact question. Generally, the types of reports you’re receiving are called Home Energy Reports (HERs). 99.9% of utilities, probably 100%, contract with third-party vendors who actually run the algorithms and help construct these reports.
In many areas, smart meters are ubiquitous. You may also see these referred to as “AMI” – Advanced Metering Infrastructure. The vast, vast majority of the appliances/electric (or gas) usage in your home cannot be disaggregated. Run-time data from smart devices (like smart thermostats) can be gathered, but this is not utilized in these reports – it’s way, way too granular and getting the data feed from Google (Nest) to the HER vendor would take way too long, is often anonymized, and has limited additional value.
Instead, much simpler algorithms are used but still have a pretty solid degree of accuracy. For example, if your usage in the cooling months spikes compared to the baseline, it means that is from your cooling load. Conversely, if your electric usage spikes in the winter, it means that is from electric heating. If it spikes in both directions, it could mean you have a cold-climate heat pump.
From there, you can make some other inferences with a good degree of certainty, i.e. lighting makes up X load of baseline usage on average, your baseline is Y, therefore it’ll show lighting will result in Z kWh on your report, and the same can be said for other usage. These reports are NOT disaggregating individual appliance usage, including bi-directional smart-home devices, even if they’re included in load shedding programs, unless you’re getting very specific load shed (demand response) emails based upon specific device enrollment (normally smart thermostats, could also be EV chargers, heat pump water heaters etc.) but even so they won’t know the exact usage from lighting, your dishawasher, your TVs etc.
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