Change detection of electric customer behavior based on AMR measurements

Smart Grids technology is emphasized a lot in the future power system worldwide. Nowadays, the widely used Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) technology in Finland makes it possible to collect customers´ hourly load measurements and to use data analysis methods for customer clustering and load prediction purposes. This paper addresses the detection of possible changes in customers´ behavior. This could for example be a result of changed habitation, heating solution change, installation of solar panels or other equipment. Basic classification and regression methods like K-means and Fuzzy C-means are utilized to analyze the electric customer behavior. The developed method successfully detects various obvious load pattern changes on different customer types. It also offers rough time information regarding at which week the change happens. This behavior change detection method can be applied in improving load modeling accuracy by considering the most recent consumption information after the change.