A new framework for electricity price forecasting via multi-head self-attention and CNN-based techniques in the competitive electricity market

Due to recent technical improvements, the smart grid has become a feasible platform for electricity market participants to successfully regulate their bidding process based on demand-side management (DSM) perspectives. At this level, practical design, implementation, and assessment of numerous demand response mechanisms and robust short-term price forecasting development in day-ahead transactions are all critical. The accuracy and effectiveness of the day-ahead price forecasting process are crucial concerns in a deregulated market. In this market, the reason for low accuracy is the limitation of electricity generation compared to the electricity demand variations. Hence, this study proposes a suitable technique for forecasting electricity prices using a multi-head self-attention and Convolutional Neural networks (CNN) based approach. Further, this study develops a feature selection technique using mutual information (MI) and neural networks (NN) to choose suitable input variable subsets significantly affecting electricity price predictions simultaneously. The combination of MI and NN reduces the number of input features used in the model, thereby decreasing the computational complexity of the NN. The actual data sets from the Ontario electricity market in 2020 are acquired to verify the simulation results. Finally, the simulation results proved the efficiency of the proposed method by demonstrating increased accuracy by attaining the lowest average value for MAPE and RMSE with a value of 1.75% and 0.0085, respectively, and compared to results obtained by recent computational intelligence approaches. By attaining accurate electricity price results, the significance of this study can be summed up as aiding the electricity industry's operators in administering effective energy management, efficient resource allocation, and informed decision-making.© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

A new approach to seasonal energy consumption forecasting using temporal convolutional networks

There has been a significant increase in the attention paid to resource management in smart grids, and several energy forecasting models have been published in the literature. It is well known that energy forecasting plays a crucial role in several applications in smart grids, including demand-side management, optimum dispatch, and load shedding. A significant challenge in smart grid models is managing forecasts efficiently while ensuring the slightest feasible prediction error. A type of artificial neural networks such as recurrent neural networks, are frequently used to forecast time series data. However, due to certain limitations like vanishing gradients and lack of memory retention of recurrent neural networks, sequential data should be modeled using convolutional networks. The reason is that they have strong capabilities to solve complex problems better than recurrent neural networks. In this research, a temporal convolutional network is proposed to handle seasonal short-term energy forecasting. The proposed temporal convolutional network computes outputs in parallel, reducing the computation time compared to the recurrent neural networks. Further performance comparison with the traditional long short-term memory in terms of MAD and sMAPE has proved that the proposed model has outperformed the recurrent neural network

Single residential load forecasting using deep learning and image encoding techniques

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. The integration of more renewable energy resources into distribution networks makes the operation of these systems more challenging compared to the traditional passive networks. This is mainly due to the intermittent behavior of most renewable resources such as solar and wind generation. There are many different solutions being developed to make systems flexible such as energy storage or demand response. In the context of demand response, a key factor is to estimate the amount of load over time properly to better manage the demand side. There are many different forecasting methods, but the most accurate solutions are mainly found for the prediction of aggregated loads at the substation or building levels. However, more effective demand response from the residential side requires prediction of energy consumption at every single household level. The accuracy of forecasting loads at this level is often lower with the existing methods as the volatility of single residential loads is very high. In this paper, we present a hybrid method based on time series image encoding techniques and a convolutional neural network. The results of the forecasting of a real residential customer using different encoding techniques are compared with some other existing forecasting methods including SVM, ANN, and CNN. Without CNN, the lowest mean absolute percentage of error (MAPE) for a 15 min forecast is above 20%, while with existing CNN, directly applied to time series, an MAPE of around 18% could be achieved. We find the best image encoding technique for time series, which could result in higher accuracy of forecasting using CNN, an MAPE of around 12%

Development of Neurofuzzy Architectures for Electricity Price Forecasting

In 20th century, many countries have liberalized their electricity market. This power markets liberalization has directed generation companies as well as wholesale buyers to undertake a greater intense risk exposure compared to the old centralized framework. In this framework, electricity price prediction has become crucial for any market player in their decision‐making process as well as strategic planning. In this study, a prototype asymmetric‐based neuro‐fuzzy network (AGFINN) architecture has been implemented for short‐term electricity prices forecasting for ISO New England market. AGFINN framework has been designed through two different defuzzification schemes. Fuzzy clustering has been explored as an initial step for defining the fuzzy rules while an asymmetric Gaussian membership function has been utilized in the fuzzification part of the model. Results related to the minimum and maximum electricity prices for ISO New England, emphasize the superiority of the proposed model over well‐established learning‐based models

Big data analytics based short term electricity load forecasting model for residential buildings in smart grids

Electricity load forecasting has always been a significant part of the smart grid. It ensures sustainability and helps utilities to take cost-efficient measures for power system planning and operation. Conventional methods for load forecasting cannot handle huge data that has a nonlinear relationship with load power. Hence an integrated approach is needed that adopts a coordinating procedure between different modules of electricity load forecasting. We develop a novel electricity load forecasting architecture that integrates three modules, namely data selection, extraction, and classification into a single model. First, essential features are selected with the help of random forest and recursive feature elimination methods. This helps reduce feature redundancy and hence computational overhead for the next two modules. Second, dimensionality reduction is realized with the help of a t-stochastic neighbourhood embedding algorithm for the best feature extraction. Finally, the electricity load is forecasted with the help of a deep neural network (DNN). To improve the learning trend and computational efficiency, we employ a grid search algorithm for tuning the critical parameters of the DNN. Simulation results confirm that the proposed model achieves higher accuracy when compared to the standard DNN

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

NILM techniques for intelligent home energy management and ambient assisted living: a review

The ongoing deployment of smart meters and different commercial devices has made electricity disaggregation feasible in buildings and households, based on a single measure of the current and, sometimes, of the voltage. Energy disaggregation is intended to separate the total power consumption into specific appliance loads, which can be achieved by applying Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) techniques with a minimum invasion of privacy. NILM techniques are becoming more and more widespread in recent years, as a consequence of the interest companies and consumers have in efficient energy consumption and management. This work presents a detailed review of NILM methods, focusing particularly on recent proposals and their applications, particularly in the areas of Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), where the ability to determine the on/off status of certain devices can provide key information for making further decisions. As well as complementing previous reviews on the NILM field and providing a discussion of the applications of NILM in HEMS and AAL, this paper provides guidelines for future research in these topics.Agência financiadora: Programa Operacional Portugal 2020 and Programa Operacional Regional do Algarve 01/SAICT/2018/39578 Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through IDMEC, under LAETA: SFRH/BSAB/142998/2018 SFRH/BSAB/142997/2018 UID/EMS/50022/2019 Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La-Mancha, Spain: SBPLY/17/180501/000392 Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (SOC-PLC project): TEC2015-64835-C3-2-R MINECO/FEDERinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Forecasting Solar Home System Customers’ Electricity Usage with a 3D Convolutional Neural Network to Improve Energy Access

Off-grid technologies, such as solar home systems (SHS), offer the opportunity to alleviate global energy poverty, providing a cost-effective alternative to an electricity grid connection. However, there is a paucity of high-quality SHS electricity usage data and thus a limited understanding of consumers’ past and future usage patterns. This study addresses this gap by providing a rare large-scale analysis of real-time energy consumption data for SHS customers (n = 63,299) in Rwanda. Our results show that 70% of SHS users’ electricity usage decreased a year after their SHS was installed. This paper is novel in its application of a three-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for electricity load forecasting using time series data. It also marks the first time a CNN was used to predict SHS customers’ electricity consumption. The model forecasts individual households’ usage 24 h and seven days ahead, as well as an average week across the next three months. The last scenario derived the best performance with a mean squared error of 0.369. SHS companies could use these predictions to offer a tailored service to customers, including providing feedback information on their likely future usage and expenditure. The CNN could also aid load balancing for SHS based microgrids

An Experimental Review on Deep Learning Architectures for Time Series Forecasting

In recent years, deep learning techniques have outperformed traditional models in many machine learning tasks. Deep neural networks have successfully been applied to address time series forecasting problems, which is a very important topic in data mining. They have proved to be an effective solution given their capacity to automatically learn the temporal dependencies present in time series. However, selecting the most convenient type of deep neural network and its parametrization is a complex task that requires considerable expertise. Therefore, there is a need for deeper studies on the suitability of all existing architectures for different forecasting tasks. In this work, we face two main challenges: a comprehensive review of the latest works using deep learning for time series forecasting; and an experimental study comparing the performance of the most popular architectures. The comparison involves a thorough analysis of seven types of deep learning models in terms of accuracy and efficiency. We evaluate the rankings and distribution of results obtained with the proposed models under many different architecture configurations and training hyperparameters. The datasets used comprise more than 50000 time series divided into 12 different forecasting problems. By training more than 38000 models on these data, we provide the most extensive deep learning study for time series forecasting. Among all studied models, the results show that long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional networks (CNN) are the best alternatives, with LSTMs obtaining the most accurate forecasts. CNNs achieve comparable performance with less variability of results under different parameter configurations, while also being more efficient