  This paper takes an approach to clustering domestic electricity load profiles
that has been successfully used with data from Portugal and applies it to UK
data. Clustering techniques are applied and it is found that the preferred
technique in the Portuguese work (a two stage process combining Self Organised
Maps and Kmeans) is not appropriate for the UK data. The work shows that up to
nine clusters of households can be identified with the differences in usage
profiles being visually striking. This demonstrates the appropriateness of
breaking the electricity usage patterns down to more detail than the two load
profiles currently published by the electricity industry. The paper details
initial results using data collected in Milton Keynes around 1990. Further work
is described and will concentrate on building accurate and meaningful clusters
of similar electricity users in order to better direct demand side management
initiatives to the most relevant target customers.
