DOE PAGES title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Situational awareness-enhancing community-level load mapping with opportunistic machine learning

Journal Article · · Applied Energy

Motivated by present and forthcoming challenges in the adoption and integration of distributed renewable energy, we develop a machine learning (ML) approach that builds short-fuse mappings connecting the occasionally-unobservable true load in one target community with information-rich signals collected from relatively more instrumented reference communities. Our setting is inspired by and tailored to target communities with significant unobservable behind-the-meter solar generation, where true load (a relatively well-behaved quantity of interest to grid operators) is hard to discern during daytime due to insufficient instrumentation and/or privacy reasons, but that can be related to reference communities with low unobservable distributed variable generation or with sufficient instrumentation. The developed mapping, herein realized with Support Vector Machine regression, is built using nighttime data from all communities, when their distributed generation is low or zero. Our ML algorithm opportunistically learns to correlate signals of interest and then is operationally used the next day to shed light into target community load evolution. The mapping is subsequently rebuilt, rolling its short-fuse scope perpetually forward in time. Here, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on nine synthetically generated topologies and associated timeseries stemming from real-world data, on which we observe cumulative error performance that yields lower than 10% and 15% daily-averaged mean absolute percentage errors in target community load estimation on more than about 75% and 90% of days, respectively, in multiple yearly evaluations that shed light on long-term performance also under seasonal and one-off effects. The proposed ML-powered methodology can offer grid operators much-improved visibility into a previously obscure space and can also serve as an additional source of information in broader, multi-modal solar disaggregation solutions.

Research Organization:
Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC07-05ID14517
OSTI ID:
2403010
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 2341672
Report Number(s):
INL/JOU--23-75703-Rev000
Journal Information:
Applied Energy, Journal Name: Applied Energy Vol. 366; ISSN 0306-2619
Publisher:
ElsevierCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (16)

Model predictive control: Theory and practice—A survey journal May 1989
Effect of residential solar and storage on centralized electricity supply systems journal March 2015
Joint Estimation of Behind-the-Meter Solar Generation in a Community journal January 2021
Solar Disaggregation conference November 2020
Behind-the-Meter Solar Generation Disaggregation at Varying Aggregation Levels Using Consumer Mixture Models journal January 2023
Disaggregating solar generation from feeder-level measurements journal March 2018
Day-ahead hourly electricity load modeling by functional regression journal May 2016
A Time-Series Distribution Test System Based on Real Utility Data conference October 2019
Characterizing patterns and variability of building electric load profiles in time and frequency domains journal June 2021
The potential impacts of grid-connected distributed generation and how to address them: A review of technical and non-technical factors journal October 2011
XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System conference January 2016
Disaggregating Customer-Level Behind-the-Meter PV Generation Using Smart Meter Data and Solar Exemplars journal November 2021
A reinforcement learning approach to long-horizon operations, health, and maintenance supervisory control of advanced energy systems journal November 2022
A Data-Driven Game-Theoretic Approach for Behind-the-Meter PV Generation Disaggregation journal July 2020
Unsupervised Disaggregation of Photovoltaic Production From Composite Power Flow Measurements of Heterogeneous Prosumers journal September 2018
Uncertainty-aware photovoltaic generation estimation through fusion of physics with harmonics information using Bayesian neural networks conference January 2023