Energy market segmentation for distributed energy resources implementation purposes

The new power market scene has made its actors aware of the importance of offering customers a set of products according to their specific needs. At the same time, a desirable massive deployment of distributed energy resources would require that the products be designed for specific purposes for each type of customer. For these reasons, it is essential to identify the energy behaviour of different customer segments existing in the electricity market. This paper presents a segmentation methodology that allows the identification of different types of customers in accordance with their energy use. This segmentation is conceptually different from the one that is currently performed by the utilities, which is based on commercial premises, but has been designed to be compatible with the current data organisation at the utilities. These characteristics make the proposed segmentation unique and useful to many energy-related applications. This segmentation methodology presented has been developed in the framework of EU-DEEP, a large VI-Framework Program of the European Commissions, where it was used to assess which segments are suitable for the implementation of distributed energy resources. The connection with this project is also discussed in the paper.