IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2020 - 65

modeling to estimate the load-shape changes that may occur
based on customer participation. Load researchers may also
support the development of building simulation models to estimate measure impacts, such as the effect of high-efficiency
air conditioners replacing their low-efficiency counterparts.
Additionally, load researchers can also support experimental
designs that estimate the energy usage patterns of new energy
efficiency initiatives, such as behavioral programs.

Marketing Studies
The load research department generally supports marketing
the same way it supports energy efficiency, namely, developing the likely load shapes resulting from new marketing
efforts. From a marketing perspective, the load research
department can provide the data needed to calculate the
profitability of specific customer segments or individual
customers as well as target information for likely participants in programs or promotions. For U.S. utilities, marketing is now often referred to as beneficial electrification, and
load research is beginning to help estimate the load associated with specific activities, such as switching electric heat
to heat pumps, changing natural gas homes to all-electric
homes, and adding electric forklifts.

Transmission and Distribution Planning
This role tends to focus on modeling the effect that load has
on system assets such as transformers, feeders, circuits, and
substations. This may include running simulations to show
the load characteristics on existing or planned circuits, feeders, and transformers and how the diversity of load changes
with the addition of customers to a transformer. These data
can be used to identify potential overloads of assets such
as transformers as well as support the appropriate sizing
of planned assets. Additionally, load researchers may help
determine the experimental design and subsequent analyses
needed to calculate the savings from CVR.

Distributed Energy Resource Planning
Distributed energy resource (DER) planning is associated
with distributed assets like solar generation and batteries
on the system. Load researchers can provide insight into the
loading of local areas to identify the siting of microgrids or
DERs. They can also help identify how additional distributed resources, such as the increased installation of rooftop
photovoltaics (PVs), can change customer load over time.
The load research department is the keeper of the current
class load profiles that provide the benchmark for measuring
the impact of customers with new distributed assets.

Renewables Integration
The load research department provides the baseline for estimating impact changes on the system as a result of renewable energy technologies. Load researchers may also get
involved in studying the technology directly and contribute
to the modeling of the impact under certain weather condimay/june 2020

tions, such as the effect on the net load of customers with
PVs behind the meter when cloud cover increases.

Smart Grid Initiatives
Smart grid initiatives involve load researchers in benchmarking existing loads of various customer classes of interest. Additionally, the load research department is part of
the greater smart grid team, which deals with issues like
meter data management, VEE, data analysis, and visualization. Depending on the smart grid initiative, other
aspects previously discussed in this article may include
energy efficiency, demand response, DERs, and renewables integration.

Integrated Resource Planning
The load researchers provide foundational information for the
integrated resource planning (IRP) function in terms of classlevel load shapes as well as load-shape changes that are likely to
occur as a result of demand response, energy efficiency, DERs,
or renewable technologies. For some utilities, load researchers
are located within the IRP department, while for others, load
researchers are an integral part of the IRP team.
In addition to the aforementioned business functions with
which load researchers interact regularly, the load research
department can also audit the billing system by tracking the
meter-to-bill process, thus helping to ensure the data's integrity. Additionally, load researchers can support the calculation of unbilled revenues based on the bill-cycle sales of the
company. If the company participates in wholesale electricity markets, the load research department provides the load
profiling data needed for the initial billing settlements before
customer data are fully available as well as the final settlement
for customers without interval load information.

Emerging Analytical Tasks
Although today's load research activities continue to focus
on creating efficient sampling plans, the high cost of metering, data collection, processing, and analysis, what about the
future? Table 2 summarizes the DNV GL survey responses on
the likelihood that load research departments would engage in
the identified analytical tasks in the near future. The survey
respondents rated their responses based on a scale of 1 (not
at all likely) to 5 (very likely). Big data analytics and big data
management were at the top of the list, followed by solarrelated issues, market segmentation, and the investigation into
customer load characteristics. In addition to the ones listed in
Table 2, a few utilities indicated that they anticipated working on tasks related to EVs, distributed generation, and battery
storage in 2019.
The following is a summary of the various analytical
activities:
✔✔ Big data analytics refers to the processing and analysis of large blocks of data, such as using individual
load profiles aggregated to domains of interest. This is
different from taking a sample of customers from the
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IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2020

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