  The dynamics of power consumption constitutes an essential building block for
planning and operating energy systems based on renewable energy supply. Whereas
variations in the dynamics of renewable energy generation are reasonably well
studied, a deeper understanding of short and long term variations in
consumption dynamics is still missing. Here, we analyse highly resolved
residential electricity consumption data of Austrian and German households and
propose a generally applicable methodology for extracting both the average
demand profiles and the demand fluctuations purely from time series data. The
analysis reveals that demand fluctuations of individual households are skewed
and consistently highly intermittent. We introduce a stochastic model to
quantitatively capture such real-world fluctuations. The analysis indicates in
how far the broadly used standard load profile (SLP) may be is insufficient to
describe the key characteristics observed. These results offer a better
understanding of demand dynamics, in particular its fluctuations, and provide
general tools for disentangling mean demand and fluctuations for any given
system. The insights on the demand dynamics may support planning and operating
future-compliant (micro) grids in maintaining supply-demand balance.
