Towards Efficient Energy Consumption: Audit of Households Electricity Consumption in Ghana

Abstract

Electricity from national grids remain the most reliable and affordable source of power to many households globally. However, in Ghana, the supply of electricity from the national grid to households is generally unstable with residential electricity tariff skyrocketing. Consumers are unable to quantify the amount of electricity purchased in kwh/month in order to appreciate the tariff band they belong to. The billing authorities only account for the approximate unit (kwh/month) for the nearest cedi spent on electricity. The run-offs lead to over/under-billing of consumers for electricity purchased and, thus, derail the agenda of efficient energy management. Given this background, we proceeded to investigate households’ electricity consumption by first, estimating the exact consumption units of electricity for any amount of electricity power purchased. Subsequently, we explored factors that affected households’ electricity consumption in Ghana. We relied on 8,599 households’ data captured in the Ghana Living Standard Survey 7. The method of maximum likelihood estimation was used to estimate a multiple regression model fitted to the monthly electricity consumption data. The results showed that the fewer are alternative sources of electricity available to households, the greater is the consumption of electricity by the households. Other significant variables found were number of rooms in a household, area (m2) of the house, number of people in the house, categories of tariff bands and number of electrical appliances in use. These variables showed positive relationship with the natural log of the estimated electricity consumed per month for any household.