Deep Learning Approaches with Optimum Alpha for Energy Usage Forecasting

Energy use is an essential aspect of many human activities, from individual to industrial scale. However, increasing global energy demand and the challenges posed by environmental change make understanding energy use patterns crucial. Accurate predictions of future energy consumption can greatly influence decision-making, supply-demand stability and energy efficiency. Energy use data often exhibits time-series patterns, which creates complexity in forecasting. To address this complexity, this research utilizes Deep Learning (DL), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), Long Short-term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) models. The main objective is to improve the accuracy of energy usage forecasting by optimizing the alpha value in exponential smoothing, thereby improving forecasting accuracy. The results showed that all DL methods experienced improved accuracy when using optimum alpha. LSTM has the most optimal MAPE, RMSE, and R2 values compared to other methods. This research promotes energy management, decision-making, and efficiency by providing an innovative framework for accurate forecasting of energy use, thus contributing to a sustainable and efficient energy system

Predicting wind energy generation with recurrent neural networks

Decarbonizing the energy supply requires extensive use of renewable generation. Their intermittent nature requires to obtain accurate forecasts of future generation, at short, mid and long term. Wind Energy generation prediction is based on the ability to forecast wind intensity. This problem has been approached using two families of methods one based on weather forecasting input (Numerical Weather Model Prediction) and the other based on past observations (time series forecasting). This work deals with the application of Deep Learning to wind time series. Wind Time series are non-linear and non-stationary, making their forecasting very challenging. Deep neural networks have shown their success recently for problems involving sequences with non-linear behavior. In this work, we perform experiments comparing the capability of different neural network architectures for multi-step forecasting in a 12 h ahead prediction. For the Time Series input we used the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s WIND Dataset [3], (the largest available wind and energy dataset with over 120,000 physical wind sites), this dataset is evenly spread across all the North America geography which has allowed us to obtain conclusions on the relationship between physical site complexity and forecast accuracy. In the preliminary results of this work it can be seen a relationship between the error (measured as R2R2 ) and the complexity of the terrain, and a better accuracy score by some Recurrent Neural Network Architectures.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Solar Irradiance Forecasting using Deep Neural Networks

Predicting solar irradiance has been an important topic in renewable energy generation. Prediction improves the planning and operation of photovoltaic systems and yields many economic advantages for electric utilities. The irradiance can be predicted using statistical methods such as artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), or autoregressive moving average (ARMA). However, they either lack accuracy because they cannot capture long-term dependency or cannot be used with big data because of the scalability. This paper presents a method to predict the solar irradiance using deep neural networks. Deep recurrent neural networks (DRNNs) add complexity to the model without specifying what form the variation should take and allow the extraction of high-level features. The DRNN is used to predict the irradiance. The data utilized in this study is real data obtained from natural resources in Canada. The simulation of this method will be compared to several common methods such as support vector regression and feedforward neural networks (FNN). The results show that deep learning neural networks can outperform all other methods, as the performance tests indicate

Classification of Occluded Objects using Fast Recurrent Processing

Recurrent neural networks are powerful tools for handling incomplete data problems in computer vision, thanks to their significant generative capabilities. However, the computational demand for these algorithms is too high to work in real time, without specialized hardware or software solutions. In this paper, we propose a framework for augmenting recurrent processing capabilities into a feedforward network without sacrificing much from computational efficiency. We assume a mixture model and generate samples of the last hidden layer according to the class decisions of the output layer, modify the hidden layer activity using the samples, and propagate to lower layers. For visual occlusion problem, the iterative procedure emulates feedforward-feedback loop, filling-in the missing hidden layer activity with meaningful representations. The proposed algorithm is tested on a widely used dataset, and shown to achieve 2$\times$ improvement in classification accuracy for occluded objects. When compared to Restricted Boltzmann Machines, our algorithm shows superior performance for occluded object classification.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1409.8576 by other author

“Dust in the wind...”, deep learning application to wind energy time series forecasting

To balance electricity production and demand, it is required to use different prediction techniques extensively. Renewable energy, due to its intermittency, increases the complexity and uncertainty of forecasting, and the resulting accuracy impacts all the different players acting around the electricity systems around the world like generators, distributors, retailers, or consumers. Wind forecasting can be done under two major approaches, using meteorological numerical prediction models or based on pure time series input. Deep learning is appearing as a new method that can be used for wind energy prediction. This work develops several deep learning architectures and shows their performance when applied to wind time series. The models have been tested with the most extensive wind dataset available, the National Renewable Laboratory Wind Toolkit, a dataset with 126,692 wind points in North America. The architectures designed are based on different approaches, Multi-Layer Perceptron Networks (MLP), Convolutional Networks (CNN), and Recurrent Networks (RNN). These deep learning architectures have been tested to obtain predictions in a 12-h ahead horizon, and the accuracy is measured with the coefficient of determination, the R² method. The application of the models to wind sites evenly distributed in the North America geography allows us to infer several conclusions on the relationships between methods, terrain, and forecasting complexity. The results show differences between the models and confirm the superior capabilities on the use of deep learning techniques for wind speed forecasting from wind time series data.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version