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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Weather normalization of billing cycle data using HELM-PC

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:103283
 [1];  [2]
  1. Union Electric Company, St. Louis, MO (United States)
  2. ICF Resources, Inc., Fairfax, VA (United States)
Union Electric, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, provides power to over 970,000 residential and 130,000 non-residential customers in Missouri and Illinois. The syste mis summer peaking, with summer loads being approximately 25% higher than winter loads. Net sales of electricity exceed 30 billion kilowatt-hours, annually. Forecasted energy and demand for Union Electric`s service territory is prepared by major class: residential, commercial, industrial, interruptible, street lighting and wholesale. Two of these major classes (commerical and industrial) are disaggregated into rate classes such as small and large general service and primary service. Because weather is a random event, forecasts are prepared on a weather normalized basis. The process of weather normalizing kilowatt-hour sales has been a much discussed topic in reent years as there are many different approaches to solving this complex problem. Most current and past approaches recognize that a load versus temperature graph is a non-linear relationship that must be addressed. Union Electric was utilizing an in-house program that accounted for this non-linear relationship in daily loads but did not account for seasonality changes or for the variability of billing cycle energy data across cycles. Using HELM-PC, allowed non-linear load versus temperature relationships (weather response functions) as well as the seasonality and variability of energy data to be fully modeled. Historical weather normalized energy sales using this approach produces a smoother data series for use in econometric models and likewise produces more accurate forecasts and revenue budgets.
Research Organization:
Electric Power Research Inst., Palo Alto, CA (United States); Pacific Consulting Services, Albany, CA (United States)
OSTI ID:
103283
Report Number(s):
EPRI-TR--105012; CONF-930969--
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English