Smart short-term electric load forecasting considering the Covid-19 epidemic impact based on deep learning

Short-term load forecasting is essential for the power company's operation and grid operators because it is necessary to ensure adequate capacity and proper power generation arrangement;this will affect operating efficiency and short-term decisions. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 epidemic as a nonlinear factor will be effective in short-term load forecasting and based on previous solutions, electrical load forecasting may not be accurate. A nonlinear and complex relationship between the factors affecting the load forecasting problem explains the need to use intelligent methods such as machine learning. This paper analyses the effect of Covid-19 epidemic countermeasures on short-term electric load forecasting in Iran. To forecast the short term electrical load, a deep neural network with a hybrid architecture and peak power consumption data, average temperature, and Covid-19 epidemic countermeasure data over 15 months during the Covid-19 epidemic was used. The results indicate an increase in forecasting accuracy considering the countermeasure's data. Also, the proposed model validation with data related to the fourth wave of the Covid-19 epidemic and the data of countermeasures modeling in Iran show the effectiveness and reasonable accuracy of the proposed model during the Covid19 epidemic. © 2022 IEEE.

Pandemic-Aware Electric Load Forecasting: A Multitask Bidirectional LSTM/CNN Model

COVID-19 pandemic has brought major uncertainty in load forecasting. Enforcing and relaxing lockdown rules, infection numbers, and the changing habits of people are the main causes of this uncertainty. Electric load forecasting maintains the balance between electric supply and demand. It also assists electric utilities in pricing their services, planning, and managing their infrastructure. This paper proposes two pandemic-aware load forecasting models (i) a city-level model, applied on the cities of Ottawa and Toronto, predicting hourly load using weather and pandemic-related features including population mobility and the number of daily COVID-19 infections, and (ii) a second open-source model forecasting quarter-hourly residential-level loads using weather and population mobility features for the city of Pune in India. Both models utilize multitask learning to jointly learn and predict future electric loads. The quarter-hourly model uses Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to learn from COVID's specific features, and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to learn from the historical load data before the pandemic. The multitask nature of the model allows for incorporating multiple datasets with different numbers of features. The residential-level multitask model allowed for learning from long-term data before COVID-19 using weather features, short-term load data, and the mobility data. Multitask learning has also enabled the use of two datasets with different numbers of features due to the lack of mobility data pre-COVID. © 2022 IEEE.

Electric load forecasting based on Long-Short-Term-Memory network via simplex optimizer during COVID-19

Electric load forecasting is a challenging research, which is of great significance to the safe and stable operation of power grid in epidemic period. In this paper, Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) model with simplex optimizer is proposed to forecast the electric load for an enterprise during the COVID-19 pandemic. The forecasting process consists of data processing, LSTM network construction and optimization. Firstly, some data processing steps includes information quantifying, electric load data cleaning, correlation-coefficient-based medical data filtering, clustering-based medical data and electric load data filling. Then LSTM-Based electric load forecasting model of enterprise is established during the COVID-19 pandemic. On this basis, LSTM network is trained and parameters are optimized via simplex optimizer. Finally, an example of the electric load forecasting of an enterprise during the COVID-19 pandemic is investigated. The forecasting results show that the reduced number of iterations is about 25% and the improved forecasting accuracy is about 5.6%. These results can be used as a reference for resuming production of enterprises and planning of electric grid.