Weather Effects in Energy Seasonal Adjustment: An Application to France Energy Consumption. Bruguet, M., Thomas, A., & Le Saout, R. (2025)

Published in The Energy Journal [working paper] [slides]

Awarded best student paper by the FAEE

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

When Words Save Watts: Government Communication and Household Electricity Use. Bruguet, M. (2025)

This paper examines whether government communication can shape household electricity consumption during periods of energy crisis. Leveraging a newly constructed corpus of over 12,000 public statements and narrative-specific measures of household attention derived from Google Trends, the study links real-time communication to shifts in residential electricity use during the 2022–2023 energy crisis in France. The results demonstrate that government communication effectively reduced electricity demand, but this effect was contingent upon specific narrative frameworks and contextual factors. Energy conservation messages significantly influenced consumption behaviour when integrated into broader crisis narratives. In contrast, crisis messages primarily drove demand reductions when accompanied by explicit warnings about potential supply disruptions. These effects are concentrated among households with flexible pricing contracts, whereas those on flat-rate tariffs responded primarily to price changes. The findings highlight the potential for targeted, crisis-framed communication to enhance demand-side flexibility and support energy policy goals during emergency periods.

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)