Application of Deep Learning Long Short-Term Memory in Energy Demand Forecasting

The smart metering infrastructure has changed how electricity is measured in both residential and industrial application. The large amount of data collected by smart meter per day provides a huge potential for analytics to support the operation of a smart grid, an example of which is energy demand forecasting. Short term energy forecasting can be used by utilities to assess if any forecasted peak energy demand would have an adverse effect on the power system transmission and distribution infrastructure. It can also help in load scheduling and demand side management. Many techniques have been proposed to forecast time series including Support Vector Machine, Artificial Neural Network and Deep Learning. In this work we use Long Short Term Memory architecture to forecast 3-day ahead energy demand across each month in the year. The results show that 3-day ahead demand can be accurately forecasted with a Mean Absolute Percentage Error of 3.15%. In addition to that, the paper proposes way to quantify the time as a feature to be used in the training phase which is shown to affect the network performance

Energy Forecasting in Smart Grid Systems: A Review of the State-of-the-art Techniques

Energy forecasting has a vital role to play in smart grid (SG) systems involving various applications such as demand-side management, load shedding, and optimum dispatch. Managing efficient forecasting while ensuring the least possible prediction error is one of the main challenges posed in the grid today, considering the uncertainty and granularity in SG data. This paper presents a comprehensive and application-oriented review of state-of-the-art forecasting methods for SG systems along with recent developments in probabilistic deep learning (PDL) considering different models and architectures. Traditional point forecasting methods including statistical, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) are extensively investigated in terms of their applicability to energy forecasting. In addition, the significance of hybrid and data pre-processing techniques to support forecasting performance is also studied. A comparative case study using the Victorian electricity consumption and American electric power (AEP) datasets is conducted to analyze the performance of point and probabilistic forecasting methods. The analysis demonstrates higher accuracy of the long-short term memory (LSTM) models with appropriate hyper-parameter tuning among point forecasting methods especially when sample sizes are larger and involve nonlinear patterns with long sequences. Furthermore, Bayesian bidirectional LSTM (BLSTM) as a probabilistic method exhibit the highest accuracy in terms of least pinball score and root mean square error (RMSE)

Wind Power Forecasting Methods Based on Deep Learning: A Survey

Accurate wind power forecasting in wind farm can effectively reduce the enormous impact on grid operation safety when high permeability intermittent power supply is connected to the power grid. Aiming to provide reference strategies for relevant researchers as well as practical applications, this paper attempts to provide the literature investigation and methods analysis of deep learning, enforcement learning and transfer learning in wind speed and wind power forecasting modeling. Usually, wind speed and wind power forecasting around a wind farm requires the calculation of the next moment of the definite state, which is usually achieved based on the state of the atmosphere that encompasses nearby atmospheric pressure, temperature, roughness, and obstacles. As an effective method of high-dimensional feature extraction, deep neural network can theoretically deal with arbitrary nonlinear transformation through proper structural design, such as adding noise to outputs, evolutionary learning used to optimize hidden layer weights, optimize the objective function so as to save information that can improve the output accuracy while filter out the irrelevant or less affected information for forecasting. The establishment of high-precision wind speed and wind power forecasting models is always a challenge due to the randomness, instantaneity and seasonal characteristics

Building thermal load prediction through shallow machine learning and deep learning

Building thermal load prediction informs the optimization of cooling plant and thermal energy storage. Physics-based prediction models of building thermal load are constrained by the model and input complexity. In this study, we developed 12 data-driven models (7 shallow learning, 2 deep learning, and 3 heuristic methods) to predict building thermal load and compared shallow machine learning and deep learning. The 12 prediction models were compared with the measured cooling demand. It was found XGBoost (Extreme Gradient Boost) and LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) provided the most accurate load prediction in the shallow and deep learning category, and both outperformed the best baseline model, which uses the previous day's data for prediction. Then, we discussed how the prediction horizon and input uncertainty would influence the load prediction accuracy. Major conclusions are twofold: first, LSTM performs well in short-term prediction (1 h ahead) but not in long term prediction (24 h ahead), because the sequential information becomes less relevant and accordingly not so useful when the prediction horizon is long. Second, the presence of weather forecast uncertainty deteriorates XGBoost's accuracy and favors LSTM, because the sequential information makes the model more robust to input uncertainty. Training the model with the uncertain rather than accurate weather data could enhance the model's robustness. Our findings have two implications for practice. First, LSTM is recommended for short-term load prediction given that weather forecast uncertainty is unavoidable. Second, XGBoost is recommended for long term prediction, and the model should be trained with the presence of input uncertainty

An Integrated Multi-Time-Scale Modeling for Solar Irradiance Forecasting Using Deep Learning

For short-term solar irradiance forecasting, the traditional point forecasting methods are rendered less useful due to the non-stationary characteristic of solar power. The amount of operating reserves required to maintain reliable operation of the electric grid rises due to the variability of solar energy. The higher the uncertainty in the generation, the greater the operating-reserve requirements, which translates to an increased cost of operation. In this research work, we propose a unified architecture for multi-time-scale predictions for intra-day solar irradiance forecasting using recurrent neural networks (RNN) and long-short-term memory networks (LSTMs). This paper also lays out a framework for extending this modeling approach to intra-hour forecasting horizons thus, making it a multi-time-horizon forecasting approach, capable of predicting intra-hour as well as intra-day solar irradiance. We develop an end-to-end pipeline to effectuate the proposed architecture. The performance of the prediction model is tested and validated by the methodical implementation. The robustness of the approach is demonstrated with case studies conducted for geographically scattered sites across the United States. The predictions demonstrate that our proposed unified architecture-based approach is effective for multi-time-scale solar forecasts and achieves a lower root-mean-square prediction error when benchmarked against the best-performing methods documented in the literature that use separate models for each time-scale during the day. Our proposed method results in a 71.5% reduction in the mean RMSE averaged across all the test sites compared to the ML-based best-performing method reported in the literature. Additionally, the proposed method enables multi-time-horizon forecasts with real-time inputs, which have a significant potential for practical industry applications in the evolving grid.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables, under review for journal submissio