Presenter Adil Khurram, PhD student, EBE-UVM, talks about the Identification of Hot Water End-use Process of Electric Water Heaters from Energy Measurements.

Abstract: 
This talk presents an algorithm for the identification of parameters for a stochastic hot water end-use process that drives a homogeneous population of thermostatically controlled electric water heaters (EWH). Usually, only metered interval consumption data (kWh) is collected and the hot water end-use process is unobservable to utility and aggregators. However, the availability of EWHs for demand response (DR) is closely coupled with the hot water end-use process. In this context, the hot water end-use process is modeled as a two-state Markov chain (Use / No use), which causes the thermostatic ON-OFF switching process to behave as a Markov renewal process (MRP). A set of first passage-time problems is developed to obtain the moments of the transition probability densities of the MRP. A key quantity in the methodology for estimating the parameters is the total time an EWH is ON within a period of interest. It is referred to as the total busy time and its statistics are used to develop the identification algorithm.