Clustering-Based Residential Baseline Estimation: A Probabilistic Perspective

Demand response (DR) is one of the most cost-effective solutions for providing flexibility to power systems. The extensive deployment of DR trials and the roll-out of smart meters enable the quantification of consumer responsiveness to price signals via baseline estimation. The traditional deterministic baseline estimation approach can provide only a single value without consideration of uncertainty. This paper proposes a novel probabilistic baseline estimation framework that consists of a daily load profile pool construction stage, a deep learning-based clustering stage, an optimal cluster selection stage, and a quantile regression forests model construction stage. In particular, the concept of a daily load profile pool is introduced, and a deep-learning-based clustering approach is employed to handle a large number of daily patterns to further improve the baseline estimation performance. Case studies have been conducted on fine-grained smart meter data collected from a real dynamic time-of-use tariffs trial of the low carbon London project. The superior performance of the proposed method is demonstrated based on a series of evaluation metrics regarding both deterministic and probabilistic estimation results.