Residential Customer Profile

The Residential Load Profile was developed using NorthWestern Energy's 1992 and 1993 residential load research data and Load Vision profiling software. The model calculates profiles representing typical diversified residential loads for two day types in each of four seasons. Each hour’s load is also a function of the temperature for that hour. Daily profiles are presented for each season, each day type, and three weather scenarios.

Seasons	Day Types
Winter: DEC, JAN, FEB Spring: MAR, APR, MAY Summer: JUN, JUL, AUG, SEP Autumn: OCT, NOV	Weekday: Monday - Friday Weekend: Saturday and Sunday
Weather Scenarios are: C – Cold, N- Normal, W – Warm.

A total of 24 profiles are included in the file. Each profile contains an hourly load profile followed by the hourly profile of actual temperatures that produced the load profile. Each of these days was chosen to be representative of a day whose 24-hour average temperature characterized the day as cold, normal, or warm for that season. An effort was made to select days with a normal hourly temperature distribution but actual temperature distribution will vary significantly.

The settlement process will use the model, seasons and day types discussed above. Actual hourly temperatures and customer meter reads will be used as input to the model to produce estimated hourly loads for settlement.

Using the Residential Profile

The following steps explain one method of estimating the hourly demand for a target residential customer (target customer can be one customer or the sum of multiple customers):

Use knowledge of target customer’s usage such as billing data to estimate usage for the desired month.
Calculate the typical customer usage for the month from the profile data:

Determine the number of weekdays and weekend days for the month.

Select the number of normal, cold, and warm days for the each of the day types and calculate the energy for each of these day types by summing the 24 values in the load profile for that day type. Check the mix of day types to insure that the number of weekdays and weekend days match those for the month.

Multiply the number of each day type selected by the energy for that day type.

Sum the energies for the day types to arrive at the monthly energy for the typical customer.

Calculate the ratio of the target customer to the typical customer’s energy.
To calculate the hourly demands for the target customer on a specific day, select the day type from the Residential file, and multiply the profile by the target customer ratio from step 3.
To determine the load profile, multiply the demand profile from step 4 by the customer class loss multiplier.

Open Residential Customer Load CSV File.
Go to Sample Residential Customer Load Profile.