Unsupervised grouping of industrial electricity demand profiles: Synthetic profiles for demand-side management applications.

Demand side management is a promising alternative to offer flexibility to power systems with high shares of variable renewable energy sources. Numerous industries possess large demand side management potentials but accounting for them in energy system analysis and modelling is restricted by the availability of their demand data, which are usually confidential. In this study, a methodology to synthetize anonymized hourly electricity consumption profiles for industries and to calculate their flexibility potential is proposed. This combines different partitioning and hierarchical clustering analysis techniques with regression analysis. The methodology is applied to three case studies in Chile: two pulp and paper industry plants and one food industry plant. A significant hourly, daily and annual flexibility potential is found for the three cases (15%–75%). Moreover, the resulting demand profiles share the same statistical characteristics as the measured profiles but can be used in modelling exercises without confidentiality issues. • The electricity demand of paper and food companies in Chile is analysed. • The analysis is based on two years of data from three companies. • 22 clustering methods are tested to generate synthetic electricity load profiles. • The demand response potential for a typical hour is approximately ± 15%. • On a daily basis up to 70% of the demand can be mobilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]