An Investigation of Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) Method as a Customer Baseline Load (CBL) Calculation for Residential Customers

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) method for calculating Customer Baseline Load (CBL) in residential demand response, focusing on error and financial performance using real customer data.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis of RCT as a novel approach for CBL calculation, addressing implementation challenges in demand response programs.

Findings

RCT shows promising error performance for residential CBL.

Aggregated load data improves RCT accuracy.

Financial benefits depend on RCT's error reduction capabilities.

Abstract

FERC Order 745 allows demand response owners to sell their load reduction in the wholesale market. However, in order to be able to sell the load reduction, some implementation challenges must be addressed, one of which is to establish Customer Baseline Load (CBL) calculation methods with acceptable error performance, which has proven to be very challenging so far. In this paper, the error and financial performance of Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) method, applied to both granular and aggregated forms of the consumption load, are investigated for a hypothetical demand response program offered to a real dataset of residential customers .