Conditional Multivariate Elliptical Copulas to Model Residential Load Profiles From Smart Meter Data

Abstract

The development of thorough probability models for highly volatile load profiles based on smart meter data is crucial to obtain accurate results when developing grid planning and operational frameworks. This paper proposes a new top-down modeling approach for residential load profiles (RLPs) based on multivariate elliptical copulas that can capture the complex correlation between time steps. This model can be used to generate individual and aggregated daily RLPs to simulate the operation of medium and low voltage distribution networks in flexible time horizons. Additionally, the proposed model can simulate RLPs conditioned to an annual energy consumption and daily weather profiles such as solar irradiance and temperature. The simulated daily profiles accurately capture the seasonal, weekends, and weekdays power consumption trends. Five databases with actual smart meter measurements at different time resolutions have been used for the model's validation. Results show that the proposed model can successfully replicate statistical properties such as autocorrelation of the time series, and load consumption probability densities for different seasons. The proposed model outperforms other multivariate state-of-the-art methods, such as Gaussian Mixture Models, by one order of magnitude in two different distance metrics for probability distributions.