In today's highly competitive and deregulated electricity market, companies in the generation, transmission and distribution sectors can all benefit from collecting, analyzing and deep-understanding their customers' load profiles. This strategic information is vital in load forecasting, demand-side management planning and long-term resource and capital planning.

With the proliferation of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) in recent years, the amount of load profile data collected by utilities has grown exponentially. Such high-resolution datasets are difficult to model and analyze due to the large size, diverse usage patterns, and the embedded noisy or erroneous data points. In order to overcome these challenges and to make the load data useful in system analysis, this dissertation introduces a frequency domain load profile modeling framework. This framework can be used a complementary technology alongside of the conventional time domain load profile modeling techniques.

There are three main components in this framework: 1) the frequency domain load profile descriptor, which is a compact, modular and extendable representation of the original load profile. A methodology was introduced to demonstrate the construction of the frequency domain load profile descriptor. 2) The load profile Characteristic Attributes in the Frequency Domain (CAFD). Which is developed for load profile characterization and classification. 3) The frequency domain load profile statistics and forecasting models. Two different models were introduced in this dissertation: the first one is the wavelet load forecast model and the other one is a stochastic model that incorporates local weather condition and frequency domain load profile statistics to perform medium term load profile forecast.

7 different utilities load profile data were used in this research to demonstrate the viability of modeling load in the frequency domain. The data comes from various customer classes and geographical regions. The results have shown that the proposed framework is capable to model the load efficiently and accurately.