A Data-Driven Approach for Targeting Residential Customers for Energy Efficiency Programs

Targeting the right customers for energy efficiency (EE) programs is crucial for the power distribution or retail companies to enhance the efficiency of marketing budget allocation and the yield of energy savings. This work presents a scalable methodology for targeting residential customers for EE programs that focus on reducing unnecessary domestic energy consumption and replacing low efficient refrigerator-freezers by using smart meter data and daily temperature data. A novel method is proposed to detect baseload (i.e., power constantly consumed by some appliances that are never turned off) segments from daily load profiles. Test on ground truth data shows the high accuracy performance of the proposed method and its adaptiveness to the heterogeneity in energy consumptions across customers. Then we discuss how the proposed method can be utilized to identify customers with high baseload energy saving potentials and low efficient refrigerator-freezers. Case studies validate that the proposed targeting strategy far outperforms random selection.