Yi Wang

The widespread popularity of smart meters enables an immense amount of fine-grained electricity consumption data to be collected. Meanwhile, the deregulation of the power industry, particularly on the delivery side, has continuously been moving forward worldwide. How to employ massive smart meter data to promote and enhance the efficiency and sustainability of the power grid is a pressing issue. To date, substantial works have been conducted on smart meter data analytics. To provide a comprehensive overview of the current research and to identify challenges for future research, this paper conducts an application-oriented review of smart meter data analytics. Following the three stages of analytics, namely, descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics, we identify the key application areas as load analysis, load forecasting, and load management. We also review the techniques and methodologies adopted or developed to address each application. In addition, we also discuss some research trends, such as big data issues, novel machine learning technologies, new business models, the transition of energy systems, and data privacy and security.

Forecasting has been an essential part of the power and energy industry. Researchers and practitioners have contributed thousands of papers on forecasting electricity demand and prices, and renewable generation (e.g., wind and solar power). This article offers a brief review of influential energy forecasting papers; summarizes research trends; discusses importance of reproducible research and points out six valuable open data sources; makes recommendations about publishing high-quality research papers; and offers an outlook into the future of energy forecasting.

Multi-energy systems (MESs) contribute to increasing energy utilization efficiency and renewable energy accommodation by coupling multiple energy sectors. The preferable characteristic of MESs raises the need for optimizing the configuration of MESs across multiple energy sectors at the planning stage. Based on the energy hub (EH) model, this research presents a two-stage mixed-integer linear programming approach for district level MES planning considering distributed renewable energy integration. The approach models an MES as a directed acyclic graph with multiple layers. The proposed EH configuration planning procedure includes two stages: 1) optimizing what equipment (e.g., energy converters, distributed renewable energy sources and storages) should be invested in for each layer and 2) optimizing the connection relationships between the invested equipment in each two adjacent layers. The proposed approach is able to optimize both the equipment selection and the MES configuration. It can be applied to both expansion planning and initial planning of MESs from scratch. An illustrative example of planning a typical MES is given. A sensitivity analysis is performed to show the impacts of load profiles, energy prices and equipment parameters on the optimal MES configuration. A case study based on the MES in Beijing's new subsidiary administrative center is conducted using the proposed approach.

In a competitive retail market, large volumes of smart meter data provide opportunities for load serving entities to enhance their knowledge of customers' electricity consumption behaviors via load profiling. Instead of focusing on the shape of the load curves, this paper proposes a novel approach for clustering of electricity consumption behavior dynamics, where “dynamics” refer to transitions and relations between consumption behaviors, or rather consumption levels, in adjacent periods. First, for each individual customer, symbolic aggregate approximation is performed to reduce the scale of the data set, and time-based Markov model is applied to model the dynamic of electricity consumption, transforming the large data set of load curves to several state transition matrixes. Second, a clustering technique by fast search and find of density peaks (CFSFDP) is primarily carried out to obtain the typical dynamics of consumption behavior, with the difference between any two consumption patterns measured by the Kullback-Liebler distance, and to classify the customers into several clusters. To tackle the challenges of big data, the CFSFDP technique is integrated into a divide-and-conquer approach toward big data applications. A numerical case verifies the effectiveness of the proposed models and approaches.