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

Regional And Residential Short Term Electric Demand Forecast Using Deep Learning

For optimal power system operations, electric generation must follow load demand. The generation, transmission, and distribution utilities require load forecasting for planning and operating grid infrastructure efficiently, securely, and economically. This thesis work focuses on short-term load forecast (STLF), that concentrates on the time-interval from few hours to few days. An inaccurate short-term load forecast can result in higher cost of generating and delivering power. Hence, accurate short-term load forecasting is essential. Traditionally, short-term load forecasting of electrical demand is typically performed using linear regression, autoregressive integrated moving average models (ARIMA), and artificial neural networks (ANN). These conventional methods are limited in application for big datasets, and often their accuracy is a matter of concern. Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for machine-learning problems, and known for real-time data processing, parallel computations, and ability to work with a large dataset with higher accuracy. DNNs have been shown to greatly outperform traditional methods in many disciplines, and they have revolutionized data analytics. Aspired from such a success of DNNs in machine learning problems, this thesis investigated the DNNs potential in electrical load forecasting application. Different DNN Types such as multilayer perception model (MLP) and recurrent neural networks (RNN) such as long short-term memory (LSTM), Gated recurrent Unit (GRU) and simple RNNs for different datasets were evaluated for accuracies. This thesis utilized the following data sets: 1) Iberian electric market dataset; 2) NREL residential home dataset; 3) AMPds smart-meter dataset; 4) UMass Smart Home datasets with varying time intervals or data duration for the validating the applicability of DNNs for short-term load forecasting. The Mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) evaluation indicates DNNs outperform conventional method for multiple datasets. In addition, a DNN based smart scheduling of appliances was also studied. This work evaluates MAPE accuracies of clustering-based forecast over non-clustered forecasts

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

Comparative analysis of residential load forecasting with different levels of aggregation

Microgrids need a robust residential load forecasting. As a consequence, this highlights the problem of predicting electricity consumption in small amounts of households. The individual demand curve is volatile, and more difficult to forecast than the aggregated demand curve. For this reason, Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) varies in a large range (of 1% to 45%), depending on the number of consumers analyzed. Different levels of aggregation of household consumers that can be used in microgrids are analyzed; the load forecasting of the single consumer and aggregated consumers are compared. The forecasting methodology used is the most consolidated of Recurrent Neural Networks, i.e., LSTM. The dataset used contains 920 residential consumers belonging to the Commission for Energy Regulation (CER), a control group that is in the Irish Social Science Data Archive (ISSDA) repository. The result shows that the forecasting of groups of more than 20 aggregated consumers has a lower MAPE that individual forecasting. On the other hand, individual forecasting is better for groups with fewer than 10 consumers