Good Consumer or Bad Consumer: Economic Information Revealed From Demand Profiles

In this paper, we demonstrate that a consumer's marginal system impact is determined only by their demand profile, rather than by their demand level. Demand-profile clustering is identical to clustering consumers according to their marginal impacts on system costs. A profile-based, uniform-rate price is economically efficient as real-time pricing. We develop a criteria system to evaluate the economic efficiency of an implemented retail price scheme in a distribution system by comparing profile clustering and daily average clustering. Our criteria system can examine the extent of a retail price scheme's inefficiency, even without information about the distribution system's daily cost structure. For this work, we analyze data from a real distribution system in China. In this system, we find that targeting each consumer's high-impact days is more efficient than targeting high-impact consumers.