Uncovering Residential PV-EV Co-Adoption from Smart-Meter Data: Load Archetypes and Detection for Demand-Side Planning
Organizations: Department of Data Science and AI, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia · Monash Energy Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Abstract
The increasing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems is reshaping residential electricity demand and creating new challenges for demand-side management (DSM), tariff design, and low-voltage network planning. Much of the existing literature examines EV charging or PV generation in isolation, leaving the behavioral dynamics of household co-adoption less understood. We develop an integrated, two-part workflow to analyze advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) data. A discovery component applies dynamic time warping (DTW) k-means with DTW barycenter averaging to cluster daily import or export profiles into interpretable behavioral archetypes, while a predictive component trains a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) model on 21-day windows and benchmarks it against tabular baselines for PV/EV activity detection. The EV activity labels are inferred from charging-like load signatures because charger measurements are unavailable. Using half-hourly AusNet residential data from Victoria, Australia, the clustering uncovers distinct patterns across PV-only, EV-only, co-adoption, and neither cohorts; for co-adopters, a midday-centered weekday export archetype accounts for approximately 50% of days. At validation-tuned thresholds, both BiLSTM and XGBoost achieve strong discrimination. BiLSTM obtains 0.991 for the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), 0.906 for macro-F1, and the highest recall on the most difficult class (0.836 for EV-only recall). Tree-based baselines remain competitive. Performance remains stable across plausible labeling rules (macro-F1: 0.894--0.914) and strictly forward temporal splits (macro-F1: 0.894--0.906).
Figures & tables
| Research theme | Representative studies | Focus and relevance to this study |
|---|---|---|
| Residential load-shape clustering | [ 33 , 11 , 43 ] | Shape- and feature-based segmentation of daily profiles, including EV-user clustering, supporting the descriptive archetype analysis. |
| Behind-the-meter PV inference | [ 22 , 24 , 23 ] | Estimate PV size and orientation and disaggregate PV and other DERs from net load, providing baselines for the PV side of detection. |
| EV detection from AMI | [ 21 , 39 , 17 , 25 ] | Supervised, event-based, and training-free EV detection for demand-response targeting, providing baselines for the EV side of detection. |
| EV charging behavior and flexibility | [ 26 , 32 , 44 , 29 ] | Characterize charging timing, flexibility, and distribution-network impacts that inform the activity-labeling rules. |
| PV–EV co-adoption | [ 20 , 34 , 31 , 3 ] | Document behavioral change, incentives, and barriers under joint ownership, providing the empirical basis for interpreting co-adoption archetypes. |
| DSM, time-of-use tariffs, and managed charging | [ 8 , 6 , 14 , 27 , 19 , 41 , 5 ] | Quantify peak-shifting benefits, solar-aligned charging, and synchronization risks that motivate cohort-aware targeting. |
| Cluster sizes | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Total | |
| PV-only weekday | 92 | 504 | 289 | 108 | 274 | 1,267 |
| PV-only weekend | 117 | 107 | 51 | 29 | 244 | 548 |
| EV-only weekday | 451 | 479 | 241 | 196 | 299 | 1,666 |
| EV-only weekend | 120 | 160 | 160 | 108 | 165 | 713 |
| Co-adoption weekday | 563 | 1,654 | 254 | 524 | 337 | 3,332 |
| Model | Accuracy | Precision | Recall | F1 | AUROC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BiLSTM | 0.926 | 0.991 | |||
| XGBoost | 0.908 | 0.908 | 0.908 | ||
| Random forest | |||||
| Logistic regression |
| Model | Class | Precision | Recall | F1 score | Sample size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BiLSTM sequence | PV-only | 4,359 | |||
| EV-only | 1,539 | ||||
| Co-adoption | 1,897 | ||||
| Neither | 1,935 | ||||
| XGBoost | PV-only | 4,359 | |||
| EV-only | 1,539 |
| Setting (label rule) | F1 | AUROC | Accuracy | PV threshold | EV threshold |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline | |||||
| EV window: active days | |||||
| Higher contrast gate | |||||
| Looser energy floor (35th percentile) | |||||
| Other variants (range) | 0.894–0.905 | 0.988–0.991 | 0.915–0.925 | 0.30–0.70 | 0.55–0.70 |
| Training/ validation cutoff | F1 | AUROC | Accuracy | PV threshold | EV threshold |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 31 Mar / 30 Jun | |||||
| 30 Jun / 30 Sep | |||||
| 30 Sep / 31 Dec |
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Cohort | Cluster | Daily import (kWh) | Peak import (kW) | Evening import (kWh) | Evening peak (kW) | Midday import (kWh) | Midday export (kWh) | Peak-to- average ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PV-only | 1 | 15.87 | 2.75 | 6.02 | 2.01 | 2.89 | 1.23 | 5.11 |
| PV-only | 2 | 9.40 | 1.97 | 4.16 | 1.54 | 0.26 | 11.21 | 5.73 |
| PV-only | 3 | 12.41 | 2.33 | 4.33 | 1.65 | 1.38 | 4.95 | 5.61 |
| PV-only | 4 | 15.89 | 2.65 | 4.96 | 1.67 | 2.84 | 0.64 | 5.15 |
| PV-only | 5 | 12.10 | 2.66 | 4.86 | 1.87 | 1.20 | 5.74 | 5.69 |
| EV-only | 1 | 18.90 | 3.31 | 8.05 | 2.91 | 3.33 | – | 4.45 |
| Cohort | Cluster | Daily import (kWh) | Peak import (kW) | Evening import (kWh) | Evening peak (kW) | Midday import (kWh) | Midday export (kWh) | Peak-to- average ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PV-only | 1 | 12.25 | 2.54 | 4.81 | 1.73 | 1.50 | 5.72 | 5.41 |
| PV-only | 2 | 13.90 | 2.60 | 5.01 | 1.70 | 1.48 | 6.12 | 6.04 |
| PV-only | 3 | 24.87 | 3.93 | 7.80 | 2.63 | 5.77 | 1.55 | 3.91 |
| PV-only | 4 | 15.97 | 2.75 | 4.86 | 1.46 | 2.84 | 0.77 | 6.67 |
| PV-only | 5 | 8.15 | 1.65 | 3.67 | 1.33 | 0.23 | 12.35 | 5.44 |
| EV-only | 1 | 16.26 | 2.62 | 4.64 | 1.57 | 3.64 | – | 4.50 |