An Investigation of Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) Method as a Customer Baseline Load (CBL) Calculation for Residential Customers
For utilities and demand response operators, this work addresses the challenge of accurate CBL calculation, but the results are preliminary and lack quantitative validation.
The paper investigates the error and financial performance of the Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) method for calculating Customer Baseline Load (CBL) in demand response programs, using real residential data. The RCT method shows potential for acceptable error performance, but no concrete numbers are provided.
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 .