An Adaptive Machine Learning Framework for Behind-the-Meter Load/PV Disaggregation

A significant amount of distributed photovoltaic (PV) generation is "invisible" to distribution system operators since it is behind the meter on customer premises and not directly monitored by the utility. The generation essentially adds an unknown varying negative demand to the system, which causes additional uncertainty in determining the total load. This uncertainty directly impacts system reliability, cold load pickup, load behavior modeling, and hence cost of operation. Thus, it is essential to create low-complexity localized models for estimating power generation from these invisible sites behind the meters. This article proposes an adaptive machine learning framework to: a) learn using weather data and a minimal number of BTM PV generation measurement sensors, b) forecast PV generation using weather, location of PV, and trained ML model at location for unmeasured BTM PV; c) use estimated PV and net load measured by smart meter or smart transformer to estimate total true load at each time step; and d) learn the specific load patterns eventually to adapt localized models. The proposed framework's core idea is to transform the data such that: a) the machine learning model can effectively utilize the time dependency of measurements; and b) the measurements are transformed into a lower dimensional space to reduce complexity while maintaining accuracy. The transformed measurements are then used to train the machine learning models for load/PV disaggregation. Machine learning models investigated include linear regression, decision tree, random forest (RF), and multilayer perceptron. The proposed framework's efficacy is demonstrated using two datasets, a real dataset from Hawaii and a simulated dataset using detailed models in GridLab-D. Several test/training split scenarios, including 90-10% split, one-month-out, one-season-out, and panel-independent split are presented to provide a thorough evaluation of the proposed framework. Results on both datasets show that the proposed framework can estimate PV generation with high accuracy using low-complexity methods. The accuracy results are comparable to higher complexity models (e.g., deep architectures), and RF is found to provide superior performance with these specific datasets compared to the other ML models investigated.