We present a simple quantile regression-based forecasting method that was applied in a probabilistic load forecasting framework of the Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2017 (GEFCom2017). The hourly load data is log transformed and split into a long-term trend component and a remainder term. The key forecasting element is the quantile regression approach for the remainder term that takes into account weekly and annual seasonalities such as their interactions. Temperature information is only used to stabilize the forecast of the long-term trend component. Public holidays information is ignored. Still, the forecasting method placed second in the open data track and fourth in the definite data track with our forecasting method, which is remarkable given simplicity of the model. The method also outperforms the Vanilla benchmark consistently.
We present a methodology for probabilistic load forecasting that is based on lasso (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) estimation. The model considered can be regarded as a bivariate time-varying threshold autoregressive(AR) process for the hourly electric load and temperature. The joint modeling approach incorporates the temperature effects directly, and reflects daily, weekly, and annual seasonal patterns and public holiday effects. We provide two empirical studies, one based on the probabilistic load forecasting track of the Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2014 (GEFCom2014-L), and the other based on another recent probabilistic load forecasting competition that follows a setup similar to that of GEFCom2014-L. In both empirical case studies, the proposed methodology outperforms two multiple linear regression based benchmarks from among the top eight entries to GEFCom2014-L.
Recently there has been significant research on power generation, distribution and transmission efficiency especially in the case of renewable resources. The main objective is reduction of energy losses and this requires improvements on data acquisition and analysis. In this paper we address these concerns by using consumers' electrical smart meter readings to estimate network loading and this information can then be used for better capacity planning. We compare Deep Neural Network (DNN) methods with traditional methods for load forecasting. Our results indicate that DNN methods outperform most traditional methods. This comes at the cost of additional computational complexity but this can be addressed with the use of cloud resources. We also illustrate how these results can be used to better support dynamic pricing.
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.
Time series (TS) occur in many scientific and commercial applications, ranging from earth surveillance to industry automation to the smart grids. An important type of TS analysis is classification, which can, for instance, improve energy load forecasting in smart grids by detecting the types of electronic devices based on their energy consumption profiles recorded by automatic sensors. Such sensor-driven applications are very often characterized by (a) very long TS and (b) very large TS datasets needing classification. However, current methods to time series classification (TSC) cannot cope with such data volumes at acceptable accuracy; they are either scalable but offer only inferior classification quality, or they achieve state-of-the-art classification quality but cannot scale to large data volumes. In this paper, we present WEASEL (Word ExtrAction for time SEries cLassification), a novel TSC method which is both scalable and accurate. Like other state-of-the-art TSC methods, WEASEL transforms time series into feature vectors, using a sliding-window approach, which are then analyzed through a machine learning classifier. The novelty of WEASEL lies in its specific method for deriving features, resulting in a much smaller yet much more discriminative feature set. On the popular UCR benchmark of 85 TS datasets, WEASEL is more accurate than the best current non-ensemble algorithms at orders-of-magnitude lower classification and training times, and it is almost as accurate as ensemble classifiers, whose computational complexity makes them inapplicable even for mid-size datasets. The outstanding robustness of WEASEL is also confirmed by experiments on two real smart grid datasets, where it out-of-the-box achieves almost the same accuracy as highly tuned, domain-specific methods.
The key component in forecasting demand and consumption of resources in a supply network is an accurate prediction of real-valued time series. Indeed, both service interruptions and resource waste can be reduced with the implementation of an effective forecasting system. Significant research has thus been devoted to the design and development of methodologies for short term load forecasting over the past decades. A class of mathematical models, called Recurrent Neural Networks, are nowadays gaining renewed interest among researchers and they are replacing many practical implementation of the forecasting systems, previously based on static methods. Despite the undeniable expressive power of these architectures, their recurrent nature complicates their understanding and poses challenges in the training procedures. Recently, new important families of recurrent architectures have emerged and their applicability in the context of load forecasting has not been investigated completely yet. In this paper we perform a comparative study on the problem of Short-Term Load Forecast, by using different classes of state-of-the-art Recurrent Neural Networks. We test the reviewed models first on controlled synthetic tasks and then on different real datasets, covering important practical cases of study. We provide a general overview of the most important architectures and we define guidelines for configuring the recurrent networks to predict real-valued time series.
Forecasting thermal load is a key component for the majority of optimization solutions for controlling district heating and cooling systems. Recent studies have analysed the results of a number of data-driven methods applied to thermal load forecasting, this paper presents the results of combining a collection of these individual methods in an expert system. The expert system will combine multiple thermal load forecasts in a way that it always tracks the best expert in the system. This solution is tested and validated using a thermal load dataset of 27 months obtained from 10 residential buildings located in Rottne, Sweden together with outdoor temperature information received from a weather forecast service. The expert system is composed of the following data-driven methods: linear regression, extremely randomized trees regression, feed-forward neural network and support vector machine. The results of the proposed solution are compared with the results of the individual methods.
Electric Vehicle (EV) is playing a significant role in the distribution energy management systems since the power consumption level of the EVs is much higher than the other regular home appliances. The randomness of the EV driver behaviors make the optimal charging or discharging scheduling even more difficult due to the uncertain charging session parameters. To minimize the impact of behavioral uncertainties, it is critical to develop effective methods to predict EV load for smart EV energy management. Using the EV smart charging infrastructures on UCLA campus and city of Santa Monica as testbeds, we have collected real-world datasets of EV charging behaviors, based on which we proposed an EV user modeling technique which combines statistical analysis and machine learning approaches. Specifically, unsupervised clustering algorithm, and multilayer perceptron are applied to historical charging record to make the day-ahead EV parking and load prediction. Experimental results with cross-validation show that our model can achieve good performance for charging control scheduling and online EV load forecasting.
This paper presents issues regarding short term electric load forecasting using feedforward and Elman recurrent neural networks. The study cases were developed using measured data representing electrical energy consume from Banat area. There were considered 35 different types of structure for both feedforward and recurrent network cases. For each type of neural network structure were performed many trainings and best solution was selected. The issue of forecasting the load on short term is essential in the effective energetic consume management in an open market environment.
We present in this paper a model for forecasting short-term power loads based on deep residual networks. The proposed model is able to integrate domain knowledge and researchers' understanding of the task by virtue of different neural network building blocks. Specifically, a modified deep residual network is formulated to improve the forecast results. Further, a two-stage ensemble strategy is used to enhance the generalization capability of the proposed model. We also apply the proposed model to probabilistic load forecasting using Monte Carlo dropout. Three public datasets are used to prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. Multiple test cases and comparison with existing models show that the proposed model is able to provide accurate load forecasting results and has high generalization capability.