Spatio-temporal estimation of electricity consumption in Bolivian municipalities using nighttime lights

Few research studies have focused on the nature of the relationship between nighttime lights and electricity consumption at subnational levels in South America, a region with heterogeneous geography and urbanization levels and complex socioeconomic dynamics. This study shows that it is possible to estimate, for Bolivia, a wide range of indicators of electricity consumption at the municipality level and two temporal scales using features derived from nighttime lights and other spatial data sources, in combination with readily available municipality characteristics. The prediction errors for annual electricity consumption range between 13% MAPE for average residential consumption and 59% MAPE for average commercial consumption. Similar accuracies are obtained when predicting monthly values. For both annual and monthly electricity consumption, we highlight the variation in estimation accuracy for various municipality subsets and show that prediction can be significantly improved when selecting municipalities based on population size, energy poverty, or levels of sustainable development.