Research of Classification of Electricity Consumers Based on Principal Component Analysis

Scientific and reasonable classification of electricity consumer is the very premise of the fair pricing of electricity tariff. The great amounts of electricity consumers make it impossible to neglect the difference of their load curves when classifying them. The theoretic classification results are not operable to implement the practical electricity tariff. Thus, establishing the proper electricity consumer classification index system is very critical for the fair pricing of electricity tariff. Focusing on the power supply cost due to the different load curves of electricity consumers, this article studies the classification of consumers based on the principle that electricity tariff should reflect the costs correctly. There are many load characteristics indexes that can influence power supply costs. This article applies principal component analysis method to eliminate the correlation and overlap of the indexes and reduce the redundancy of these indexes. Then making the cluster analysis of electricity consumers with principal components and setting up the electricity consumer classification model. And finally, this article makes the calculation of this model with example. The calculation results show that this classification model is very effective and accurate to reflect the difference of power supply costs for different electricity consumers. And also this results show the validity of the model.