High-resolution net load forecasting for micro-neighbourhoods with high penetration of renewable energy sources

Abstract

Though extensive, the literature on electrical load forecasting lacks reports on studies focused on existing residential micro-neighbourhoods comprising small numbers of single-family houses equipped with solar panels. This paper provides a full description of an ANN-based model designed to predict short-term high-resolution (15-min intervals) micro-scale residential net load profiles. Since it seems especially relevant due to the specificity of local autocorrelations in load signal, in this paper we put stress on the systematic approach to feature selection in the context of lagged signal. We performed a case study of a real micro-neighbourhood comprising only 75 single-family houses. The obtained average prediction error was equivalent to 5.4 per cent of the maximal measured net load. The issues, i.e.: (1) the feasibility of micro-scale residential load forecasting taking into account renewable energy penetration, (2) the feasibility to predict net load with dense temporal resolution of 15 min, (3) the feature selection problem, (4) the proposed prosumption- and comparison-oriented prediction model key performance measure, could be of interest to engineers designing energy balancing systems for local smart grids.