Weather Effects in Energy Seasonal Adjustment: An Application to France Energy Consumption - Marie Bruguet, Arthur Thomas, Ronan Le Saout (2025) Accepted at The Energy Journal ; Awarded best student paper by the FAEE [working paper] [slides]

This paper addresses the challenge of adjusting energy consumption data for weather variations by introducing a novel General Weather Indicator (GWI). The GWI combines multiple weather variables, including temperature, wind, sunlight, rain, and cloudiness, using a novel econometric approach that applies K-means for threshold identification and LASSO for variable selection. Through an empirical analysis of sectoral, electricity and natural gas consumption in France, we demonstrate that the GWI outperforms the standard HDD approach by addressing three main concerns: the lack of statistical criteria for defining the base temperature, the reliance solely on temperature as the weather variable, and the assumption of a constant base temperature over time and space. Based on these results, we propose an analysis of the sectoral functional form and an estimation of weather elasticities for energy demand in France at both monthly and daily levels.

Ongoing Works

Unveiling France’s Energy Conservation Policy : Insights from the 2022-2023 Energy Crisis - Marie Bruguet

This paper investigates the drivers behind the decline in French residential electricity consumption during the 2022–2023 energy crisis. Using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model tailored to daily consumption data, it quantifies the contribution of electricity prices, weather anomalies, and government communication strategies. A novel semi-supervised text classification approach is applied to over 12,000 governmental speeches to construct time-varying indicators of two narratives: energy crisis warnings and generic energy conservation messaging. The findings reveal that retail price increases explain a 7.1 TWh reduction, crisis-related government communication a further 2.0 TWh, and warmer temperatures 2.4 TWh. In contrast, generic conservation statements had no measurable effect on consumption. Households with off-peak tariffs exhibited significantly stronger responsiveness to both prices and crisis narratives, while base tariff households showed limited adjustment. These results highlight that communication strategies anchored in crisis framing, rather than generic conservation appeals, are critical to achieving behavioral change in energy demand, particularly when combined with price signals.

Web articles

Des consommations d’énergie dépendantes des conditions météorologiques - Marie Bruguet (2025)

Les conditions de logement des ménages résidant en France en 2020 - Béatrice Boutchenik, Marie Bruguet and Gaëtan Polard (2022)