An Energy Portrait-Based Identification Method of Building Users for Demand Response

Demand response is an effective solution for balancing supply and demand in modern energy supply systems. For utility or load aggregators, it is important to accurately target potential consumers to participate in demand response programs to recruit a massive number of users. This is especially important for the invitation-based demand response mode, which is currently often used in China. In this paper, a portrait-based method is proposed to effectively identify potential consumers for different demand response tasks based on historical loads. Eight indicators are proposed to quantify the energy consumption characteristics from different aspects, and an evaluation method is introduced. Then, a selection method based on the K-means clustering algorithm and support vector machine classifiers is proposed. The method is tested under two scenarios, including load shifting and monthly peak shaving. The results show that the proposed method can identify potential users effectively, and the accuracy of the trained classification model exceeds 99.9%. The proposed portrait-based identification method provides an effective way to describe users’ energy consumption characteristics and select potential users effectively, which is very useful for helping the utility or virtual plant with load management.