Electricity consumer classification using artificial intelligence

In a deregulated energy environment, consumers can purchase electricity from any provider regardless of size and location. As a result, there is a growing interest in understanding the nature of variations in consumer consumption. This information can be used to facilitate an electricity supplier in their marketing strategy. Thus, it is essential to have typical load profiles of different groups of consumers. Many techniques for consumer classification have been reported in the past. The techniques include applications of statistics, unsupervised clustering technique and methods based on frequency domain approach. This paper examines the capability of artificial intelligent techniques to classify electricity consumers by their pattern of consumption. Fuzzy clustering and an artificial neural network (ANN) have been employed in this study. The results obtained demonstrate the ability of the proposed method in classifying consumers by their energy consumption.