Analyzing the Energy Usage of a Community and the Benefits of Energy Storage

Understanding the energy usage of a community is crucial for policymaking, energy planning, and achieving sustainable development. The advent of the smart grid has made is feasible to gather fine-grain energy usage data at large-scales, providing us with new opportunities to understand demand patterns at different spatial and temporal scales. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of energy usage of 14,849 residential and commercial energy consumers from a small city in the United States. We conduct a wide ranging analysis of energy usage at multiple granularities—citywide, transformer-level, and individual home levels. In doing so, we demonstrate how city-wide smart meter datasets can answer a variety of questions on energy consumption, such as the impact of weather on energy usage. For example, we show that extreme weather events significantly increase energy usage, e.g., by 36% and 11.5% on hot summer and cold winter days, respectively. As another example, we show 19.2% of transformers in the grid get overloaded during peak load periods. Finally, we evaluate the impact of incorporating varying amounts of energy storage within the distribution grid and the impact such deployments will have on the peak demand patterns seen by the grid as well as the ability to reduce overloads seen by distribution transformers during peak periods.