predicting energy usage question

Hi /r/machinelearning

I was wondering if you folks might have any suggestions on a pet project that I've been thinking about. Also, if I'm barking up the wrong subreddit, please inform me.

Anyways, I have my hands on data for thousands of households' energy usage for discrete fifteen minute time intervals over ~1+ years of time. I also have data like 'how many sq ft is the house' and 'what was the weather on whichever day' and some other interesting things.

I was wondering if there might be some cool methods to implement in order to try to predict future energy usage amounts on a household basis. Something where I could say "This household's energy usage for the past xxxx 15 minute blocks of time looks like this. I predict that in the next 15 minutes they will use y kWh."

I don't know too much about ML, but stuff like Markov Chains pop into my mind because I have discrete events. Unfortunately, my values for the events aren't very discrete and furthermore they are ordinal. I've never seen a MC that deals with this kind of data (then again, I have a really, really naive sense of MCs).

I'm a decent programmer and mathematician, but haven't forayed into ML ever. I'd love to learn more if you all have any suggestions on how to approach this problem.

Thanks!