Metered Electricity Consumption 2023

Statistician's Comment

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (23 July 2024) published Metered Electricity Consumption 2023.

Commenting on the release Dr Grzegorz Głaczyński, Statistician in the Climate and Energy Division, said: "Non-residential consumption was 72% of total metered electricity consumption in 2023, while Urban Residential and Rural Residential tariff groups were 18% and 10% respectively (See Table 1). The consumption by Urban Residential and Rural Residential tariff groups decreased by 2% and 3% respectively between 2022 and 2023. Non-residential consumption increased by 4% over the same period.

Total metered electricity consumption was 30,581 GWh in 2023, which was up 2.5% on 2022 (See Table 1).

Residential Consumption

On a quarterly basis, the main seasonal variation was in the residential sector with 31% of consumption in 2023 in the first quarter compared with 21% in the third quarter (See Tables 2A and 2C).

Dublin Postal Districts had the highest proportion of residential consumption in 2023 at 18%, followed by Cork (12%), Dublin County (7%), Galway (6%) and Kildare (5%).

Median residential consumption was 3,174 kWh in 2023, a 4% decrease from the 3,310 kWh median in 2022 (See Table 5B). January to March had the highest median consumption in 2023 at 872 kWh compared with 614 kWh for July to September (See Table 5A).

Median residential electricity consumption was down in every county in 2023 compared with 2022 (See Table 5B). Donegal (2,575 kWh), Leitrim (2,630 kWh) and Mayo (2,812 kWh) had the lowest median residential consumption in 2023. Kildare with 3,697 kWh had the highest figure.

Electricity consumption per household can be used as an indirect indicator of vacant and holiday dwellings. It can also be a sign of energy poverty. It is affected by the size of the usable floor area and by the energy efficiency rating of a dwelling. Around 10% of residential customers consumed less than 1,000 kilowatt hours in 2023 which was well below the median of 3,174 kilowatt hours (See Table 7).

Non-Residential Consumption

Dublin 15 at 13% and Dublin 2 at 13% had the highest proportion of non-residential electricity consumption in 2023 in the Dublin Postal Districts area (See Table 4A).

Dublin 15 (10%) and Dublin 24 (9%) were the postal districts with the highest proportions of residential electricity consumption among the Dublin Postal Districts (See Table 4B). 

Large Energy Users

Large Energy Users comprise a small number of customers such as the largest data centres and the highest electricity consumers in other business sectors such as IT and cement manufacturing.

Consumption by Large Energy Users increased by 16% between 2022 and 2023. Large Energy Users accounted for 30% of metered electricity consumed in 2023, an increase from their 26% share in 2022 (See Table 1).

Number of Electricity Meters

The number of non-residential electricity meters increased from 274,094 in 2015 to 299,373 in 2023 (See Table 6A).

The number of residential electricity meters increased by around 171,460 in the same period (See Table 6B).

Peak Large Energy Users Consumption

The peak daily electricity consumption for very large energy users in 2023 was between 1pm and 3pm (See Figure 4).

The peak period in 2023 for metered electricity generation was between 5pm and 7pm (Metered Electricity Generation)."

Editor's Note

The urban and rural residential DUoS groups include some small non-residential consumption such as newsagents and farms.

Large Energy Users are a combination of DUoS groups DG8, DG9, DG10 and TCON.

The allocation of customers to counties was mainly done by the CSO using the customer file provided by ESB Networks. In some cases, addresses contained placenames only and not the county name. Partial addresses were more difficult to assign to a county.