Behind-the-Meter Photovoltaic Visibility from Net Smart Meters: Deployment Regimes and Operational Insights
Organizations: Department of Data Science and AI, Faculty of IT, Monash University, Australia · Monash Energy Institute, Monash University, Australia
Abstract
Distribution operators need visibility of behind-the-meter photovoltaic (PV) generation, yet most residential customers are observed only through net smart meters. Deep-learning-based PV disaggregation can restore this visibility, but its operational value depends on whether the model serves known customers, new customers, future periods, or new regions. We quantify this dependence using four deployment regimes that separate household transfer from temporal extrapolation, applied to Ausgrid smart-meter data with cross-dataset adaptation to the Pecan Street data. Using a fixed training protocol, we benchmark representative deep sequence architectures for PV disaggregation under regime-matched evaluation. At a fixed 48-hour context length, daylight mean absolute error (MAE) of the best model rises from 0.104kW on seen households in the future test period to 0.185kW on unseen households over the same period, and under a fixed training contract the deployment regime explains far more of the error variation than model choice. Under target-domain normalization, fine-tuning on five target-region households reduces source-model transfer error by 28%--36%. Long input windows help known-customer extrapolation, while their new-customer benefits vary by model. These findings suggest regime-matched error budgets, limited target supervision for model adaptation in new regions, and use-case-dependent context selection for energy data analytics.
Figures & tables
| ID | Method | S1 | S2 | S3 | S4 | CD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [ 13 ] | ST-SGCCaps | ✓ | – | – | – | |
| [ 3 ] | CNN-BiLSTM | – | ✓ | – | – | – |
| [ 15 ] | ANN | – | – | ✓ | – | – |
| [ 4 ] | Sparse attention graph GRU | – | – | – | ||
| [ 5 ] | LSTM GDFM/CDFM | – | – | – | ||
| [ 6 ] | Conditional DDPM + U-Net | – | – | ✓ | – | ✓ |
| Regime | Houses | Time period | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| S1 | Seen | Training-period held-out days | Known-customer interpolation |
| S2 | Seen | Final 183 days | Known-customer future visibility |
| S3 | Unseen | Pre-test period | Household-transfer diagnostic |
| S4 | Unseen | Final 183 days | New-customer future visibility |
| Item | Setting |
|---|---|
| Sampling resolution | 30 minutes |
| Input channels | net load, GHI, DNI, DHI, SZA, temperature |
| Primary metric | daylight MAE in denormalized kW |
| Daylight mask | |
| Main context | half-hourly steps |
| Future test period | final 183 days |
| Model | S1 | S2 | S3 | S4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CNN-BiLSTM | 0.123 [0.114–0.132] | 0.104 [0.097–0.112] | 0.186 [0.170–0.208] | 0.185 [0.168–0.210] |
| TCN | 0.123 [0.115–0.132] | 0.111 [0.103–0.119] | 0.186 [0.171–0.203] | 0.188 [0.172–0.206] |
| TFT | 0.124 [0.116–0.132] | 0.107 [0.100–0.116] | 0.184 [0.168–0.204] | 0.187 [0.169–0.212] |
| TimesNet | 0.125 [0.117–0.135] | 0.121 [0.113–0.131] | 0.192 [0.176–0.214] | 0.200 [0.182–0.224] |
| Mamba | 0.147 [0.138–0.158] | 0.129 [0.120–0.139] | 0.196 [0.183–0.215] | 0.207 [0.191–0.227] |
| PatchTST | 0.156 [0.146–0.169] | 0.180 [0.166–0.201] | 0.209 [0.192–0.242] | 0.237 [0.223–0.258] |
| Model | Source model | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TCN | 0.554 [0.475–0.634] | 0.392 [0.351–0.434] | 0.373 [0.294–0.452] | 0.353 [0.306–0.399] | 0.377 [0.294–0.460] |
| CNN-BiLSTM | 0.515 [0.443–0.587] | 0.403 [0.369–0.438] | 0.385 [0.311–0.459] | 0.367 [0.323–0.411] | 0.385 [0.306–0.464] |
| TFT | 0.521 [0.454–0.588] | 0.407 [0.376–0.437] | 0.389 [0.318–0.460] | 0.371 [0.336–0.407] | 0.393 [0.304–0.483] |
| TimesNet | 0.578 [0.490–0.666] | 0.424 [0.364–0.484] | 0.402 [0.328–0.475] | 0.384 [0.328–0.440] | 0.396 [0.326–0.466] |
| Mamba | 0.589 [0.507–0.671] | 0.433 [0.388–0.478] | 0.402 [0.339–0.465] | 0.393 [0.357–0.429] | 0.409 [0.342–0.476] |
| PatchTST | 0.713 [0.598–0.828] | 0.608 [0.543–0.673] | 0.541 [0.455–0.627] | 0.510 [0.451–0.570] | 0.505 [0.422–0.588] |
| Model | S2 best | S2 | S4 best | S4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CNN-BiLSTM | 192 | -0.0238 | 48 | 0.0026 |
| TCN | 192 | -0.0191 | 96 | -0.0006 |
| TFT | 192 | -0.0228 | 24 | 0.0053 |
| TimesNet | 192 | -0.0146 | 48 | 0.0167 |
| Mamba | 192 | -0.0346 | 192 | -0.0091 |
Power Systems
Power systems research studies the planning, operation, control, and protection of electrical grids and their integration with energy resources.
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