Functional Principal Component Analysis as a Versatile Technique to Understand and Predict the Electric Consumption Patterns
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Understanding and predicting the electric consumption patterns in the short-, mid- and long-term, at the distribution and transmission level, is a fundamental asset for smart grids infrastructure planning, dynamic network reconfiguration, dynamic energy pricing and savings, and thus energy efficiency. This work introduces the Functional Principal Component Analysis among other more common techniques as a versatile method to both investigate and predict, at different level of spatial aggregation, the consumption patterns. The method uniquely allows to investigate and correlate the shape of the daily load patterns to exogenous variables, providing an unparalleled way to understand the physical causes that determines the daily load patterns, and to predict future load patterns with a selected cumulative explained variability by choosing a priori a limited set of functional basis to predict the future.
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