Electric Load Forecasting System Research Articles

Estimating Energy Forecasting Uncertainty for Reliable AI Autonomous Smart Grid Design

Building safe, reliable, fully automated energy smart grid systems requires a trustworthy electric load forecasting system. Recent work has shown the efficacy of Long Short-Term Memory neural networks in energy load forecasting. However, such predictions do not come with an estimate of uncertainty, which can be dangerous when critical decisions are being made autonomously in energy production and distribution. In this paper, we present methods for evaluating the uncertainty in short-term electrical load predictions for both deep learning and gradient tree boosting. We train Bayesian deep learning and gradient boosting models with real electric load data and show that an uncertainty estimate may be obtained alongside the prediction itself with minimal loss of accuracy. We find that the uncertainty estimates obtained are robust to changes in the input features. This result is an important step in building reliable autonomous smart grids.

A novel combined model based on hybrid optimization algorithm for electrical load forecasting

Accurate electrical load forecasting always plays a vital role in power system administration and energy dispatch, which are the foundation of the smooth operation of the national economy and people’s daily life. Thinking from this vision, many scholars have made great efforts to seek suitable optimization algorithms to improve the performance of existing forecasting algorithm. However, most of the studies ignore the inherent disadvantages of single optimization algorithm, which leads to sub-optimal forecasting performance. Therefore, a novel electric load forecasting system was successfully proposed in this paper by the combination of data preprocessing, hybrid optimization algorithms, and several single classical forecasting methods, which successfully overcomes the defects of single traditional forecasting models and achieves higher forecasting accuracy than that of single model optimization. Besides, the 30 min interval data of Queensland, Australia from March to April is used as illustrative examples to evaluate the performance of the developed model. The results of tests demonstrate that the proposed hybrid model can better approximate the actual value, and it can also be employed as a useful tool for smart grids dispatching planning.

Day-Ahead Load Forecasting using Support Vector Regression Machines

Accurate day-ahead load prediction plays a significant role to electric companies because decisions on power system generations depend on future behavior of loads. This paper presents a strategy for short-term load forecasting that utilizes support vector regression machines. Proper data preparation, model implementation and model validation methods were introduced in this study. The SVRM model being implemented is composed of specific features, parameters, data architecture and kernel to achieve accurate pattern discovery. The developed model was implemented into an electric load forecasting system using the java open source library called LibSVM. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model, the performance of the developed model is evaluated through the validation set of the study and compared to other published models. The created SVRM model produced the lowest Mean Average Percentage Error (MAPE) of 1.48% and was found to be a viable forecasting technique for a day-ahead electric load forecasting system.

COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNIQUES FOR HOME ELECTRIC LOAD FORECASTING AND BALANCING

The paper presents an electric load balancing system for domestic use. An electric load forecasting system, which is realized by a genetic algorithm-based modified neural network, is employed. On forecasting the home power consumption profile, the load balancing system can adjust the amount of energy stored in battery accordingly, preventing it from reaching certain practical limits. A steady consumption from the AC mains can then be obtained which will benefit both the users and the utility company. An example will be given to illustrate the merits of the forecaster, and its performance on achieving the load balancing.

A real-time short-term peak and average load forecasting system using a self-organising fuzzy neural network

This paper presents a self organising fuzzy-neural-network-based short-term electric load forecasting system for real-time implementation. A learning algorithm is devised for updating the connecting weights as well as the structure of the membership function of the network. The number of rules in the inferencing layer is optimised; this in turn optimises the network structure. The proposed algorithm exploits the notion of error back-propagation. The network is initialised with random weights. Experimental results of the system are discussed from a practical standpoint. The system accounts for seasonal and daily characteristics, as well as abnormal conditions, holidays and other conditions. It is capable of forecasting load with a lead time of one day to one week. The adaptive mechanism is used to train the network on-line. The results indicate that the proposed load forecasting system is robust and yields more accurate forecasts. Furthermore, it allows greater adaptability to sudden changes, compared with simple neural-network or statistical approaches. Extensive studies have been performed for all seasons, and some of them are presented in this paper. The new algorithm is tested with a typical load date of the Virginia Utility, and produces a very robust and accurate forecast, with a Mean Absolute of Percentage of Error (MAPE) mostly less than 1.8% for 24-hours-ahead peak load forecast, and 1.6% for a 168-hours-ahead forecast.

ANNSTLF-a neural-network-based electric load forecasting system

A key component of the daily operation and planning activities of an electric utility is short-term load forecasting, i.e., the prediction of hourly loads (demand) for the next hour to several days out. The accuracy of such forecasts has significant economic impact for the utility. This paper describes a load forecasting system known as ANNSTLF (artificial neural-network short-term load forecaster) which has received wide acceptance by the electric utility industry and presently is being used by 32 utilities across the USA and Canada. ANNSTLF can consider the effect of temperature and relative humidity on the load. Besides its load forecasting engine, ANNSTLF contains forecasters that can generate the hourly temperature and relative humidity forecasts needed by the system. ANNSTLF is based on a multiple ANN strategy that captures various trends in the data. Both the first and the second generation of the load forecasting engine are discussed and compared. The building block of the forecasters is a multilayer perceptron trained with the error backpropagation learning rule. An adaptive scheme is employed to adjust the ANN weights during online forecasting. The forecasting models are site independent and only the number of hidden layer nodes of ANN's need to be adjusted for a new database. The results of testing the system on data from ten different utilities are reported.

A real-time short-term load forecasting system using functional link network

This paper presents a new functional-link network based short-term electric load forecasting system for real-time implementation. The load and weather parameters are modelled as a nonlinear ARMA process and parameters of this model are obtained using the functional approximation capabilities of an auto-enhanced functional link net. The adaptive mechanism with a nonlinear learning rule is used to train the link network on-line. The results indicate that the functional link net based load forecasting system produces robust and more accurate load forecasts in comparison to simple adaptive neural network or statistical based approaches. Testing the algorithm with load and weather data for a period of two years reveals satisfactory performance with mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) mostly less than 2% for a 24-hour ahead forecast and less than 2.5% for a 168-hour ahead forecast.

Practical experiences with an adaptive neural network short-term load forecasting system

An adaptive neural network based short-term electric load forecasting system is presented. The system is developed and implemented for Florida Power and Light Company (FPL). Practical experiences with the system are discussed. The system accounts for seasonal and daily characteristics, as well as abnormal conditions such as cold fronts, heat waves, holidays and other conditions. It is capable of forecasting load with a lead time of one hour to seven days. The adaptive mechanism is used to train the neural networks when on-line. The results indicate that the load forecasting system presented gives robust and more accurate forecasts and allows greater adaptability to sudden climatic changes compared with statistical methods. The system is portable and can be modified to suit the requirements of other utility companies. >