Short term energy forecasting techniques for virtual power plants

YesThe advent of smart meter technology has enabled periodic monitoring of consumer energy consumption. Hence, short term energy forecasting is gaining more importance than conventional load forecasting. An Accurate forecasting of energy consumption is indispensable for the proper functioning of a virtual power plant (VPP). This paper focuses on short term energy forecasting in a VPP. The factors that influence energy forecasting in a VPP are identified and an artificial neural network based energy forecasting model is built. The model is tested on Sydney/ New South Wales (NSW) electricity grid. It considers the historical weather data and holidays in Sydney/ NSW and forecasts the energy consumption pattern with sufficient accuracy

Building Energy Load Forecasting using Deep Neural Networks

Ensuring sustainability demands more efficient energy management with minimized energy wastage. Therefore, the power grid of the future should provide an unprecedented level of flexibility in energy management. To that end, intelligent decision making requires accurate predictions of future energy demand/load, both at aggregate and individual site level. Thus, energy load forecasting have received increased attention in the recent past, however has proven to be a difficult problem. This paper presents a novel energy load forecasting methodology based on Deep Neural Networks, specifically Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) algorithms. The presented work investigates two variants of the LSTM: 1) standard LSTM and 2) LSTM-based Sequence to Sequence (S2S) architecture. Both methods were implemented on a benchmark data set of electricity consumption data from one residential customer. Both architectures where trained and tested on one hour and one-minute time-step resolution datasets. Experimental results showed that the standard LSTM failed at one-minute resolution data while performing well in one-hour resolution data. It was shown that S2S architecture performed well on both datasets. Further, it was shown that the presented methods produced comparable results with the other deep learning methods for energy forecasting in literature

Detecting and characterizing high-frequency oscillations in epilepsy: a case study of big data analysis

abstract: We develop a framework to uncover and analyse dynamical anomalies from massive, nonlinear and non-stationary time series data. The framework consists of three steps: preprocessing of massive datasets to eliminate erroneous data segments, application of the empirical mode decomposition and Hilbert transform paradigm to obtain the fundamental components embedded in the time series at distinct time scales, and statistical/scaling analysis of the components. As a case study, we apply our framework to detecting and characterizing high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) from a big database of rat electroencephalogram recordings. We find a striking phenomenon: HFOs exhibit on–off intermittency that can be quantified by algebraic scaling laws. Our framework can be generalized to big data-related problems in other fields such as large-scale sensor data and seismic data analysis.The final version of this article, as published in Royal Society Open Science, can be viewed online at: http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/4/1/16074

New input identification and artificial intelligence based techniques for load prediction in commercial building

The accuracy of prediction models for electrical loads are important as the predicted result can affect processes related to energy management such as maintenance planning, decision-making processes, as well as cost and energy savings. The studies on improving load prediction accuracy using Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LSSVM) are widely carried out by optimizing the LSSVM hyper-parameter which includes the Kernel parameter and the regularization parameter. However, studies on the effects of input data determination for the LSSVM have not widely tested by researchers. This research developed an input selection technique using Modified Group Method of Data Handling (MGMDH) to improve the accuracy of buildings load forecasting. In addition, a new cascaded Group Method of Data Handing (GMDH) and LSSVM (GMDH-LSSVM) model is developed for electrical load prediction to improve the prediction accuracy of LSSVM model. To further improve the prediction model ability, a Modified GMDH has been cascaded to the LSSVM model to enhance the accuracy of building electrical load prediction and reduce the complexity of GMDH model. The proposed models are compared with GMDH model, LSSVM model and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model to observe the prediction performance. The performances of prediction for each tested models are evaluated using the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). In this analysis, the proposed prediction model, gives 33.82% improvement of prediction accuracy as compared to LSSVM model. From this research, it can be concluded that cascading the models can improve the prediction accuracy and the proposed models can be used to predict building electrical loads

The long-term trends on Russian electricity market: comparison of empirical mode and wavelet decompositions

The problem of trend-cyclic component filtering from price time-series arises in many commodity market studies, including those of wholesale electricity market. The long-term component filtering is an important part of price analysis since incorrect determination of this component may result in substantial risk underestimation, distorted expectations of both consumers and power generating companies, as well as financial losses. A great strand of literature on this topic proposes quite a lot of approaches and procedures for solving this problem, but all of them suffer from two principal flaws: (1) inability to deal with non-stationary and nonlinear processes; (2) assumption of an "a priori", knowledge of the phenomenon being studied. The complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) allows to effectively overcome these flaws and is expected to produce more adequate results as compared to other methods. In order to check this, we compare the performance of CEEMDAN with the ordinary EMD and yet another well-known approach - the wavelet-decomposition, with an example of the Russian day-ahead electricity market (price zones Europe-Ural and Siberia). Our results shows that the CEEMDAN is much more effective than the standard EMD and is comparable with the wavelet-decomposition (in terms of trend estimation error). At the same time, we found that there are some real data problems with the criterion of the number of low-frequency modes that are included into trend

Methods for Optimal Microgrid Management

Abstract During the last years, the number of distributed generators has grown significantly and it is expected to become higher in the future. Several new technologies are being de-veloped for this type of generation (including microturbines, photovoltaic plants, wind turbines and electrical storage systems) and have to be integrated in the electrical grid. In this framework, active loads (i.e., shiftable demands like electrical vehicles, intelligent buildings, etc.) and storage systems are crucial to make more flexible and smart the dis-tribution system. This thesis deals with the development and application of system engi-neering methods to solve real-world problems within the specific framework of microgrid control and management. The typical kind of problems that is considered when dealing with the manage-ment and control of Microgrids is generally related to optimal scheduling of the flows of energy among the various components in the systems, within a limited area. The general objective is to schedule the energy consumptions to maximize the expected system utility under energy consumption and energy generation constraints. Three different issues related to microgrid management will be considered in detail in this thesis: 1. The problem of Nowcasting and Forecasting of the photovoltaic power production (PV). This problem has been approached by means of several data-driven techniques. 2. The integration of stations to charge electric vehicles in the smart grids. The impact of this integration on the grid processes and on the demand satisfaction costs have been analysed. In particular, two different models have been developed for the optimal integration of microgrids with renewable sources, smart buildings, and the electrical vehicles (EVs), taking into account two different technologies. The first model is based on a discrete-time representation of the dynamics of the system, whereas the second one adopts a discrete-event representation. 3. The problem of the energy optimization for a set of interconnencted buildings. In ths connection, an architecture, structured as a two-level control scheme has been developed. More precisely, an upper decision maker solves an optimization problem to minimize its own costs and power losses, and provides references (as 3 regars the power flows) to local controllers, associated to buildings. Then, lower level (local) controllers, on the basis of a more detailed representation of each specific subsystem (the building associated to the controller), have the objective of managing local storage systems and devices in order to follow the reference values (provided by the upper level), to contain costs, and to achieve comfort requirements

Energy Analytics for Infrastructure: An Application to Institutional Buildings

abstract: Commercial buildings in the United States account for 19% of the total energy consumption annually. Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), which serves as the benchmark for all the commercial buildings provides critical input for EnergyStar models. Smart energy management technologies, sensors, innovative demand response programs, and updated versions of certification programs elevate the opportunity to mitigate energy-related problems (blackouts and overproduction) and guides energy managers to optimize the consumption characteristics. With increasing advancements in technologies relying on the ‘Big Data,' codes and certification programs such as the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) evaluates during the pre-construction phase. It is mostly carried out with the assumed quantitative and qualitative values calculated from energy models such as Energy Plus and E-quest. However, the energy consumption analysis through Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is not commonly used by energy managers to perform complete implementation, causing the need for better energy analytic framework. The dissertation utilizes Interval Data (ID) and establishes three different frameworks to identify electricity losses, predict electricity consumption and detect anomalies using data mining, deep learning, and mathematical models. The process of energy analytics integrates with the computational science and contributes to several objectives which are to 1. Develop a framework to identify both technical and non-technical losses using clustering and semi-supervised learning techniques. 2. Develop an integrated framework to predict electricity consumption using wavelet based data transformation model and deep learning algorithms. 3. Develop a framework to detect anomalies using ensemble empirical mode decomposition and isolation forest algorithms. With a thorough research background, the first phase details on performing data analytics on the demand-supply database to determine the potential energy loss reduction potentials. Data preprocessing and electricity prediction framework in the second phase integrates mathematical models and deep learning algorithms to accurately predict consumption. The third phase employs data decomposition model and data mining techniques to detect the anomalies of institutional buildings.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering 201