A data-driven approach to predict hourly load profiles from time-of-use electricity bills

The design of renewable-based and collective energy systems requires consumption data with fine temporal and spatial resolution. Despite the increasing deployment of smart meters, obtaining such data directly from measurements can still be challenging, particularly when attempting to gather historical data over a reasonable period for many end users. As a result, there is a need for models to simulate or predict these consumption data (e.g., hourly load profiles). Typically, these models rely on numerous specific and detailed observations, such as load type, household size for residential customers, or operating hours for commercial ones. However, gathering this level of detail becomes increasingly difficult as the number and diversity of end users increase. Therefore, this paper proposes a data-driven approach to predict hourly load profiles of heterogeneous end users using only their monthly time-of-use electricity bills as inputs. We create a training set using a limited number of hourly measurements from diverse categories of end users and, differently from other approaches aimed at classifying the end users, we develop a regression model to map monthly electricity bills to typical load profiles. Experimental results using one year of data from various end-user categories demonstrate an average normalized mean absolute error of approximately 26% for instantaneous consumption and less than 4% for time-of-use values. Comparative analysis with standard load profiles and a two-step data-driven approach based on classification reveals that our proposed method outperforms the others in terms of prediction accuracy and statistical metrics.