Fancy math

I came across another interesting article on simulating load profiles and this one suggests using principal components analysis and some regression. I had a go with it yesterday and managed to get a pretty good approximation using one year of electricity demand data at hourly interval. Running princomp in R, I picked three components out of 24 and that covers 98% of the variance. Check it out (click for bigger):

The next step is to add some exogenous variables and see if I can generate new curves given likely temperatures, days of the week, holidays and so on. I’ll have to brush up on my matrix math a bit first though.