Smart Meters Time Series Clustering for Demand Response Applications in the Context of High Penetration of Renewable Energy Resources

The variability in generation introduced in the electrical system by an increasing share of renewable technologies must be addressed by balancing mechanisms, demand response being a prominent one. In parallel, the massive introduction of smart meters allows for the use of high frequency energy use time series data to segment electricity customers according to their demand response potential. This paper proposes a smart meter time series clustering methodology based on a two-stage k-medoids clustering of normalized load-shape time series organized around the day divided into 48 time points. Time complexity is drastically reduced by first applying the k-medoids on each customer separately, and second on the total set of customer representatives. Further time complexity reduction is achieved using time series representation with low computational needs. Customer segmentation is undertaken with only four easy-to-interpret features: average energy use, energy–temperature correlation, entropy of the load-shape representative vector, and distance to wind generation patterns. This last feature is computed using the dynamic time warping distance between load and expected wind generation shape representative medoids. The two-stage clustering proves to be computationally effective, scalable and performant according to both internal validity metrics, based on average silhouette, and external validation, based on the ground truth embedded in customer surveys.