Framework for Extracting and Characterizing Load Profile Variability Based on a Comparative Study of Different Wavelet Functions

The penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) on the electric power system is changing traditional power flow and analysis studies. DERs may cause the systems' protection and control equipment to operate outside their intended parameters, due to DERs' variability and dispatchability. As this penetration grows, hosting capacity studies as well as protection and control impact mitigation become critical components to advance this penetration. In order to conduct such studies accurately, the electric power system's distribution components should be modeled correctly, and will require realistic time series loads at varying temporal and spatial conditions. The load component consists of the built environment and its load profiles. However, large-scale building load profiles are scarce, expensive, and hard to obtain. This article proposes a framework to fill this gap by developing detailed and scalable synthesized building load profile data sets. Specifically, a framework to extract load variability characteristics from a subset of buildings' empirical load profiles is presented. Thirty-four discrete wavelet transform functions with three levels of decomposition are used to extract a taxonomy of load variability profiles. The profiles are then applied to modeled building load profiles, developed using the energy simulation program EnergyPlus
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, to generate synthetic load profiles. The synthesized load profiles are variations of realistic representations of measured load profiles, containing load variabilities observed in actual buildings served by the electric power system. The paper focuses on the framework development with emphasis on variability extraction and application to develop 750 synthesized load profiles at a 15-minute time resolution.