Simultaneous Estimation of Behind-the-Meter Solar and Wind Power at the Bulk Supply Point

Abstract

The presence of distributed energy resources in private premises has observed a large deployment worldwide driven by favorable governmental policies and technology development. In Northern Ireland, the small-scale generation capacity including solar and wind power has fast-grown accounting for over 17% of peak load in 2021, which makes net demands more volatile and diminishes the accuracy of electric demand forecasting activities. Different from traditional load forecasting methods based on the relationship between heterogeneous variables and net demand fluctuation, a novel approach is proposed to separately forecast the invisible components (e.g. wind & solar power) within the net demand. The critical challenge in the separate forecasting is how to extract behind-the-meter components from the measured net demand data, namely net demand disaggregation, for which continuous wavelet transform is applied to bring out the detailed fluctuation of net demand and an iterative search algorithm is proposed to separate the components in the net demand. The results reported show that the proposed demand disaggregation method contributes to reduce the forecasting error by more than 14%. Methods like the proposed net demand disaggregation can benefit utilities and system operators in performing their daily activities regarding load forecasting in serving areas and power systems they operate.