Load Profiles

Introduction

The electric energy market is an hourly market with associated bids and hourly spot market prices. Each utility member of PJM is required to post hourly electric loads for every Load Serving Entity (LSE) serving retail load in the utility’s zone. To accomplish this, the utility must estimate hourly loads for customers who do not have hourly meters.

Some retail customers do not have meters capable of registering energy usage on an hourly basis. Load profiling is the process of allocating a customer’s accumulated kWh over a billing cycle to the individual hours in that cycle. Through load profiling, customers without hourly meters are able to participate in the electric retail market.

The allocation of total billed energy to specific hours will be based on actual rate class average profiles. In the initial estimation for the settlement of energy among LSEs, BGE will use the hourly profiles along with each customers’ specific usage factor. In the final estimation and settlement, for which real-time metering data for the period to be settled have been collected, BGE will use actual hourly data when available. For customers without available hourly data, the allocation of total billed energy to specific hours will be based on the actual hourly profiles.

BGE’s load profiles are based on average Historical Hourly Load Data in kWh collected from a statistical sample of the segment to be profiled. From the sample data an average profile for each segment is created for each hour in the year. The sample data used to compute these averages are also utilized to calculate the hourly weather sensitive load profiles used for the day-after energy settlement with PJM.

Actual Load Profile Methodology

BGE’s load profiles are based on the actual AMI hourly data. The AMI hourly data is aggregated and averaged for each profiled segments for each hour in the year. These actual load profiles are used in the initial settlement estimation and final reconciliation settlement by LSE for PJM.