Modeling electricity consumption using nighttime light images and artificial neural networks

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to model electricity consumption using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). Total electricity consumption and consumption generated by households (HH) were modeled. The input variables of the ANN were based on nighttime light images from VIIRS DNB. Studies conducted thus far have covered mainly linear models. Most of case studies focused on single countries or groups of countries with only few focusing on the sub-national scale. This paper is pioneering in covering an area of Poland (Central Europe) at NUTS-2 level. The use of ANN enabled the modeling of the non-linear relations associated with the complex structure of electricity demand. Satellite data were collected for the period 2013–2016, and included images with improved quality (inter alia higher resolution), compared to the DMSP/OLS program. As images are available from April 2012 onwards, it is only recently that their number has become sufficient for ANN learning. The images were used to create models of multilayer perceptrons. The results achieved by ANN were compared with the results obtained using linear regressions. Studies have confirmed that electricity consumption can be determined with higher precision by the ANN method.