Use of load profile curves for the energy market

In order to be competitive, retailers need to have good knowledge about their client's energy consumption patterns in order to acquire the right amount of electricity needed to maintain the supply and demand balance. Therefore in periods of high consumption, energy is more expensive than in low consumption intervals. This means that if two users for example have different peaks of load and energy consumption but in two different intervals, they are charged the same even if one has the peak in the low consumption period and the other has the peak in the high consumption interval. This type of bill does not account for seasonal variation of the demand among the same type of consumers and is called a Flat Tariff. For this situation, load profiling techniques are applied to differentiate consumers based on their energy consumption patterns giving them the possibility to be treated fairly by creating time variant tariffs that reflect the wholesale market. In this paper load profiles curves for gas stations will be studied for the purpose of allowing them to participate to the electricity market. In our case study we are using K-Means clustering and with software IBM SPSS we create cluster analysis.