A Blind Source Separation Framework to Monitor Sectoral Power Demand from Grid-Scale Load Measurements

As we are moving towards decentralized power systems dominated by intermittent electricity generation from renewable energy sources, demand-side flexibility is becoming a critical issue. In this context, it is essential to understand the composition of electricity demand at various scales of the power grid. At the regional or national scale, there is however little visibility on the relative contributions of different consumer categories, due to the complexity and costs of collecting end-users consumption data. To address this issue, we propose a blind source separation framework based on a constrained variant of non-negative matrix factorization to monitor the consumption of residential, services and industrial sectors at high frequency from aggregate high-voltage grid load measurements. Applying the method to Italy's national load curve between 2021 and 2023, we reconstruct accurate hourly consumption profiles for each sector. Results reveal that both households and services daily consumption behaviors are driven by two distinct regimes related to the season and day type whereas industrial demand follows a single, stable daily profile. Besides, the monthly consumption estimates of each sector derived from the disaggregated load are found to closely align with sample-based indices and be more precise than forecasting approaches based on these indices for real-time monitoring.