Clustering heat users based on consumption data

• In today's district heating (DH) energy market, it is common to use user functional categories in price models to determine the heat price. However, users in the same category do not necessarily have the same energy consumption patterns, which potentially leads to unfair prices and many other practical issues. Taking into account heat usage characteristics, this work proposes two data-driven methods to cluster DH users to identify similar usage patterns, using practical energy consumption data. Efforts are focused on extracting representative features of users from their daily usage profiles and duration curves, respectively. Employing clustering based on these features, the resulting typical usage patterns and user category distributions are discussed. Our results can serve as potential inputs for future energy price models, demand-side management, and load reshaping strategies.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik -- Energiteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering -- Energy Engineering (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Consumption profile

District heating

Duration curve

User clustering

Electric utilities

Data-driven methods

Energy markets

Future energies

Practical energies

Practical issues

Energy utilization

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)