An investigation of the Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) method as a Customer Baseline Load (CBL) calculation for residential customers

Abstract

FERC Order 745 allows demand response owners to sell their load reduction in the wholesale market. However, in order to be able to sell the load reduction, some implementation challenges must be addressed, one of which is to establish Customer Baseline Load (CBL) calculation methods with acceptable error performance, which has proven to be very challenging. In this paper, the error and financial performance of Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) method, applied to both granular and aggregated forms of the consumption load, are investigated and compared with traditional methods for a hypothetical demand response program offered to a real dataset of residential customers. It is found that RCT shows an acceptable performance for granular forms of load. In contrast, the traditional methods show a better performance for aggregated forms of load compared to the RCT method.