Promoting academic excellence amongst the engineering students

This paper describes activities carried out by the College of Engineering at Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN) in order to promote academic excellence amongst the engineering students and to enhance their academic standings. The issues affecting the academic performance are briefly discussed. The activities involve all students majoring in Electrical, Mechanical and Civil Engineering at UNITEN. The discussions highlight some examples of the orientation and motivation programs, student support system, engineering related enrichment activities and outcome-based education. The objective of this paper is to share the experiences gained when conducting these activities and how they benefit the students

Moving holidays' effects on the Malaysian peak daily load

Malaysia’s yearly steady growth in electricity consumption as a result of fast development in various sectors of the Malaysian economy have increased the need to have a more robust, reliable and accurate load forecasting for short -, medium-, or long-term. A reliable method for short term load forecasting is crucial to any decision maker in a power utility company. Many studies have been made to improve the forecasting accuracy using various methods. The forecasting errors for the holiday seasons are known to be higher than those for weekends. This paper aims to determine which model would be a better model to estimate the holiday effects and therefore give a better forecasting accuracy for the peak daily load in Malaysia. Some of the holiday effects in Malaysia are from Eid ul-Fitr, Christmas, Independence Day and Chinese New Year. The seasonal ARIMA (SARIMA) and Dynamic Regression (DR) or Transfer function modelling are considered. Furthermore, the final selection of the models depends on the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and others such as the sample autocorrelation function (ACF), the sample partial autocorrelation function (PACF) and a bias-corrected version of the Akaike’s information criterion (AICC) statistic. The Dynamic Regression (DR) model recorded 2.22% as the lowest MAPE value for the 2004 New Year’s Eve and 2.39% for the seven days ahead forecasting. And therefore, DR model is the most appropriate model to be considered for forecasting any public holidays in Malaysia

Malaysian peak daily load forecasting

Time series analysis has been applied intensively and sophisticatedly to model and forecast many problems in the biological, physical and environmental phenomena of interest. This fact accounts for the basic engineering problem in forecasting the daily peak system load to use time series analysis. ARMA and Regression with ARMA errors models are among the times series models considered. ANFIS, a hybrid model from neural network is also discussed as for comparison purposes. The main interest of the forecasts consists of three days up to seven days ahead predictions for daily data. The objective is to find an appropriate model for forecasting the Malaysian peak daily demand of electricity. The pure autoregressive model with an order 2 or AR (2) has the minimum AIC statistic value compared with other ARMA models. AR (2) model recorded the value for the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) as 1.27% for the prediction of 3 days ahead from Jan 1 to 3, 2005. Besides AR(2) model, Regression model with ARMA errors and ANFIS were found to be among the best forecasting models for weekdays with MAPE value from 0.1% to 3%

Feature selection and parameter optimization with GA-LSSVM in electricity price forecasting

Forecasting price has now become essential task in the operation of electrical power system. Power producers and customers use short term price forecasts to manage and plan for bidding approaches, and hence increasing the utility’s profit and energy efficiency as well. The main challenge in forecasting electricity price is when dealing with non-stationary and high volatile price series. Some of the factors influencing this volatility are load behavior, weather, fuel price and transaction of import and export due to long term contract. This paper proposes the use of Least Square Support Vector Machine (LSSVM) with Genetic Algorithm (GA) optimization technique to predict daily electricity prices in Ontario. The selection of input data and LSSVM’s parameter held by GA are proven to improve accuracy as well as efficiency of prediction. A comparative study of proposed approach with other techniques and previous research was conducted in term of forecast accuracy, where the results indicate that (1) the LSSVM with GA outperforms other methods of LSSVM and Neural Network (NN), (2) the optimization algorithm of GA gives better accuracy than Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and cross validation. However, future study should emphasize on improving forecast accuracy during spike event since Ontario power market is reported as among the most volatile market worldwide

Ambient temperature effect on Amorphous Silicon (A-Si) Photovoltaic module using sensing technology

Temperature and solar irradiance are the two dominating cardinals that determine the electrical performance of Photovoltaic (PV) module. In this paper, an experiment is conducted considering Amorphous Silicon (A-Si) PV module in both indoor and outdoor condition to investigate the temperature effect on A-Si module's performance in terms of efficiency and output power through an automatic resistor selection system. The experimental result shows that A-Si PV module has small temperature coefficient effect; however it has higher effect on solar radiation coefficient. A comparison analysis is evaluated with different models to validate the experimental data

Load forecasting using time series models

Load forecasting is a process of predicting the future load demands. It is important for power system planners and demand controllers in ensuring that there would be enough generation to cope with the increasing demand. Accurate model for load forecasting can lead to a better budget planning, maintenance scheduling and fuel management. This paper presents an attempt to forecast the maximum demand of electricity by finding an appropriate time series model. The methods considered in this study include the Naïve method, Exponential smoothing, Seasonal Holt-Winters, ARMA, ARAR algorithm, and Regression with ARMA Errors. The performance of these different methods was evaluated by using the forecasting accuracy criteria namely, the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Relative Percentage Error (MARPE). Based on these three criteria the pure auto regressive model with an order 2, or AR (2) under ARMA family emerged as the best model for forecasting electricity demand

Power System Controlled Islanding Using Modified Discrete Optimization Techniques

Controlled islanding is implemented to save the power system from experiencing blackouts during severe sequence line tripping. The power system is partitioned into several stand-alone islands by removing the optimal transmission line during controlled islanding execution. Since selecting the optimal transmission lines to be removed (cutsets) is important in this action, a good technique is required in order to determine the optimal islanding solution (lines to be removed). Thus, this paper developed two techniques, namely Modified Discrete Evolutionary Programming (MDEP) and Modified Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (MDPSO) to determine the optimal islanding solution for controlled islanding implementation. The best technique among these two which is based on their capability of producing the optimal islanding solution with minimal objective function (minimal power flow disruption) will be selected to implement the controlled islanding. The performance of these techniques is evaluated through case studies using the IEEE 118-bus test system. The results show that the MDEP technique produces the best optimal islanding solution compared to the MDPSO and other previously published techniques

Dynamic regression intervention modeling for the Malaysian daily load

Malaysia is a unique country due to having both fixed and moving holidays. These moving holidays may overlap with other fixed holidays and therefore, increase the complexity of the load forecasting activities. The errors due to holidays’ effects in the load forecasting are known to be higher than other factors. If these effects can be estimated and removed, the behavior of the series could be better viewed. Thus, the aim of this paper is to improve the forecasting errors by using a dynamic regression model with intervention analysis. Based on the linear transfer function method, a daily load model consists of either peak or average is developed. The developed model outperformed the seasonal ARIMA model in estimating the fixed and moving holidays’ effects and achieved a smaller Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) in load forecast

A novel Zigbee-based data acquisition system for distributed photovoltaic generation in smart grid

Distributed photovoltaic (PV) power plant monitoring is one of the crucial aspects for energy forecasting and demand management in the future smart grid (SG) through establishing low-powered communication technology. In this paper, Zigbee wireless technology is considered for AC electrical parameters' monitoring of the distributed PV plant located at Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM). For this consideration, relevant measurement circuits, Arduino UNO embedded board, and Zigbee radio are interfaced to create a wireless (WS)-node for installing in the PV inverter. In addition, a LabVIEW program is implemented and linked to Microsoft Access Database (MS Access DB) at the control center server system for the Zigbee-based wireless data acquisition, storage, and monitoring. The obtained data from the developed system are also validated with the actual PV generation. The results are found comparable and it also reveals that low-powered Zigbee is ideal for monitoring the distributed PV generation where the data delivery requirement is not urgent

Malaysian day-type load forecasting

Time series analysis has been applied intensively and sophisticatedly to model and forecast many problems in the biological, physical and environmental phenomena of interest. This fact accounts for the basic engineering problem in forecasting the daily peak system load to use time series analysis. ARMA and REgARMA models are among the times series models considered. ANFIS, a hybrid model from neural network is also discussed as for comparison purposes. The main interest of the forecasts consists of three days up to five days ahead predictions for daily data. The pure autoregressive model with an order 2, or AR (2) with a MAPE value of 1.27% is found to be an appropriate model for forecasting the Malaysian peak daily load for the 3 days ahead prediction. ANFIS model gives a better MAPE value when weekends' data were excluded. Regression models with ARMA errors are found to be good models for forecasting different day types. The selection of these models is depended on the smallest value of AIC statistic and the forecasting accuracy criteria