Demand‐side price‐responsive flexibility and baseline estimation through end‐to‐end learning

Abstract

Abstract Time‐varying electricity tariffs provide consumers the flexibility to adjust their consumption patterns in response to price variations to reduce the cost of electricity while at the same time contributing to grid operation. As more homes and buildings utilize time‐varying tariffs, utilities and regulators must seek ways to model demand‐side flexibilities to predict future demands and design new incentives. This paper proposes a novel end‐to‐end deep learning framework that simultaneously identifies demand baselines and the price‐response model from the net demand measurements and price signals. A gradient‐descent approach is then proposed that backpropagates the net demand forecast errors to update the weights of the price‐response model and the weights of the baseline demand forecast jointly. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through computation experiments with synthetic demand response traces and a large‐scale real‐world DR dataset. The results show that the approach accurately identifies the DR model, even without prior knowledge about the baseline demand.

Keywords

• demand side management
• energy consumption
• neural net architecture