Residential Load Forecasting based on Deep Neural Network

This paper presents residential load forecasting using multivariate multi-step Deep Neural Networks (DNN) such as LSTM, CNN, Stacked LSTM, and Hybrid CNN-LSTM. A preliminary Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is conducted, and the decision variables are identified. An elbowing method is used to determine the number of clusters. Data is categorized based on weekdays, weekends, vacations, and Covid-Lockdown. Dimensionality-reduction using principal component analysis (PCA) is conducted. Seasonality-based clustering is found to improve the DNN model prediction accuracy further. A comparative analysis employs error metrics such as RMSE, MSE, MAPE, and MAE. The multivariate LSTM model with feedback is found to be the best fit model with the better performance indices. © 2023 IEEE.

Data-Driven Resilient Load Forecasting Model for Smart Metered Distribution System

The change in the electricity demand pattern globally due to sudden extreme weather conditions or situations like COVID 19 pandemic has brought unanticipated challenges for the electric utilities and operators around the world. This work primarily deals with the issue of load forecasting during such type of high impact low frequency (HILF) events. In this paper, we propose a novel resilient short-term load forecasting model capable of producing good forecasting performance for normal as well as critical situations during the COVID 19 pandemic and will also be useful for load forecasting for other HILF situations like natural calamity effect on load demand of the power system. The proposed method uses a feed-forward neural network (FFNN) with an added training feature named resiliency factor to forecast load in both regular and special scenarios. The resiliency factor for any type of node in the distribution system is decided by the power utility using the historical data and declared in advance. The proposed model is tested using the smart metered data available from a real-life distribution grid of an academic cum residential campus. The model is giving satisfactory results for both normal as well as COVID scenario for the said network. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Dynamic Frequency Analysis of the Jordanian Power System with Significant Penetration of Renewables: Lessons Learnt from the COVID-19 Lockdowns

The increasing dependence on renewable energy particularly solar Photovoltaic (PV) to supply energy consumption needs in Jordan has placed operational challenges on the power system operator to cope with the significant drop in the system's net-demand and the reduction in synchronous inertia. These challenges were not expected to become critical until the penetration of renewables increases to meet future national energy targets in the forthcoming years. However, the adoption of lockdowns to restrict the outbreak of COVID-19 combined with PV injections reduced the system's net-demand particularly during daytime in spring 2020 like expected levels in the future with high PV penetration. Thus, the implications of future significant penetration of renewables on system security could be better understood based on the operating conditions during lockdowns. In particular, it is important to assess the system's frequency adequacy during emergency events that might be occurred whilst running a low-inertia power system. To do so, this paper provides a detailed dynamic frequency analysis of the Jordanian power system during lockdowns using Power Factory software. The results highlight the importance of energy curtailment of renewables to maintain adequate level of synchronous inertia to maintain security when the system is islanded without interconnections to neighboring countries. However, deciding the proper level of curtailment requires performing dynamic analysis to ensure that both the Rate of Change of Frequency (RoCoF) and the minimum frequency level during generation contingency events will not trigger the Under Frequency Load Shedding (UFLS) relays. © 2022 IEEE.

Short-term load forecasting based on machine learning and epidemic association features

Accurate power load forecasting is an important guarantee for normal operation of a power system. There have been problems of large fluctuations in load demand and difficulty in modeling historical reference load during the COVID-19 outbreak. Thus this paper proposes a short-term load forecasting method based on machine learning, silent index and rolling anxiety index. First, Google mobility data and epidemic data are used to construct the silent index and rolling anxiety index to quantify the impact of the economic and epidemic developments on the power load. Then, the maximal information coefficient is used to analyze the strong correlation factors of power load during the epidemic and introduce epidemic load correlation characteristics. Finally, meteorological data, historical load and the constructed epidemic correlation features are combined as the input variables of the prediction model, and the prediction algorithm is analyzed by multiple machine learning models. The results show that the load forecasting model with the introduction of the epidemic correlation features can effectively improve the accuracy of load forecasting during the epidemic. © 2022 Power System Protection and Control Press. All rights reserved.

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.

Smart Short-Term Load Forecasting through Coordination of LSTM-Based Models and Feature Engineering Methods during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Short-term load forecasting is essential for power companies because it is necessary to ensure sufficient capacity. This article proposes a smart load forecasting scheme to forecast the short-term load for an actual sample network in the presence of uncertainties such as weather and the COVID-19 epidemic. The studied electric load data with hourly resolution from the beginning of 2020 to the first seven days of 2021 for the New York Independent Operator is the basis for the modeling. The new components used in this article include the coordination of stacked long short-term memory-based models and feature engineering methods. Also, more accurate and realistic modeling of the problem has been implemented according to the existing conditions through COVID-19 epidemic data. The influential variables for short-term load forecasting through various feature engineering methods have contributed to the problem. The achievements of this research include increasing the accuracy and speed of short-term electric load forecasting, reducing the probability of overfitting during model training, and providing an analytical comparison between different feature engineering methods. Through an analytical comparison between different feature engineering methods, the findings of this article show an increase in the accuracy and speed of short-term load forecasting. The results indicate that combining the stacked long short-term memory model and feature engineering methods based on extra-trees and principal component analysis performs well. The RMSE index for day-ahead load forecasting in the best engineering method for the proposed stacked long short-term memory model is 0.1071. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Short-term load forecasting based on machine learning and epidemic association features

Accurate power load forecasting is an important guarantee for normal operation of a power system. There have been problems of large fluctuations in load demand and difficulty in modeling historical reference load during the COVID-19 outbreak. Thus this paper proposes a short-term load forecasting method based on machine learning, silent index and rolling anxiety index. First, Google mobility data and epidemic data are used to construct the silent index and rolling anxiety index to quantify the impact of the economic and epidemic developments on the power load. Then, the maximal information coefficient is used to analyze the strong correlation factors of power load during the epidemic and introduce epidemic load correlation characteristics. Finally, meteorological data, historical load and the constructed epidemic correlation features are combined as the input variables of the prediction model, and the prediction algorithm is analyzed by multiple machine learning models. The results show that the load forecasting model with the introduction of the epidemic correlation features can effectively improve the accuracy of load forecasting during the epidemic. © 2022 Power System Protection and Control Press. All rights reserved.

Short-Term State Electricity Load Forecasting Based on Transfer-Informer

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has caused an enormous impact on the operation mode of human society. Such sudden events bring sharp fluctuations and data inadequacy in datasets of several areas, which leads to challenges in solving related problems. Traditional deep learning models like CNN have shown relatively poor performance with small datasets during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is because the data insufficiency and fluctuations lead to serious problems in the training process. In our work, an Informer framework combined with Transfer learning methods (Transfer-Informer) is proposed to solve the data insufficiency in emergency situations, as well as to provide a more efficient self-attention mechanism for deep feature mining, with two distinctive advantages: (1) The ProbSpares self-attention mechanisms, which enables the proposed model to highlight dominant information and extract more typical features from time-series datasets. (2) The Transfer learning framework improves the generalization capability of the model, by transferring basic knowledge from normal situations to emergency cases with fewer data. In our experiments, Transfer-Informer is applied to short-term load forecasting, which achieves better predicting accuracy than traditional models. The empirical results indicate that the proposed model has put forward a baseline for short-term load forecasting in emergency situations and provided a feasible method to tackle sudden fluctuations in real problem-solving. © 2022 IEEE.

Short-Term State Electricity Load Forecasting Based on Transfer-Informer

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has caused an enormous impact on the operation mode of human society. Such sudden events bring sharp fluctuations and data inadequacy in datasets of several areas, which leads to challenges in solving related problems. Traditional deep learning models like CNN have shown relatively poor performance with small datasets during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is because the data insufficiency and fluctuations lead to serious problems in the training process. In our work, an Informer framework combined with Transfer learning methods (Transfer-Informer) is proposed to solve the data insufficiency in emergency situations, as well as to provide a more efficient self-attention mechanism for deep feature mining, with two distinctive advantages: (1) The ProbSpares self-attention mechanisms, which enables the proposed model to highlight dominant information and extract more typical features from time-series datasets. (2) The Transfer learning framework improves the generalization capability of the model, by transferring basic knowledge from normal situations to emergency cases with fewer data. In our experiments, Transfer-Informer is applied to short-term load forecasting, which achieves better predicting accuracy than traditional models. The empirical results indicate that the proposed model has put forward a baseline for short-term load forecasting in emergency situations and provided a feasible method to tackle sudden fluctuations in real problem-solving. © 2022 IEEE.

In Search of Deep Learning Architectures for Load Forecasting: A Comparative Analysis and the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Model Performance

In power grids, short-term load forecasting (STLF) is crucial as it contributes to the optimization of their reliability, emissions, and costs, while it enables the participation of energy companies in the energy market. STLF is a challenging task, due to the complex demand of active and reactive power from multiple types of electrical loads and their dependence on numerous exogenous variables. Amongst them, special circumstances-such as the COVID-19 pandemic-can often be the reason behind distribution shifts of load series. This work conducts a comparative study of Deep Learning (DL) architectures-namely Neural Basis Expansion Analysis Time Series Forecasting (N-BEATS), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN)-with respect to forecasting accuracy and training sustainability, meanwhile examining their out-of-distribution generalization capabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic era. A Pattern Sequence Forecasting (PSF) model is used as baseline. The case study focuses on day-ahead forecasts for the Portuguese nationa115-minute resolution net load time series. The results can be leveraged by energy companies and network operators (i) to reinforce their forecasting toolkit with state-of-the-art DL models;(ii) to become aware of the serious consequences of crisis events on model performance;(iii) as a high-level model evaluation, deployment, and sustainability guide within a smart grid context. © 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.

Short-Term Load Forecasting Using a Parallel CNN-BPNN Prediction Model with COVID-19 Pandemic Restriction as an Added Input Parameter and ReLU Activation Function

Short-term load forecasting provides a vital tool for the power system. This study delved into applying a hybridized machine learning algorithm to improve load forecasting accuracy. It aims to investigate the accuracy of the parallel CNN-BPNN prediction model in short-term load forecasting with Philippine pandemic restriction as an added parameter and a ReLU activation function. The CNN, BPNN, and the proposed parallel CNN-BPNN models were implemented using Python. They were trained, validated, and tested using the input parameters such as historical power demand, day of weeks/ Holidays, meteorological data such as temperature, wind speed, humidity, and COVID-19 pandemic restriction. The accuracy of the three models was tested using the MAPE. Results showed that the proposed model achieved the lowest MAPE of 3.52 %, lower than that of the CNN, 4.62%, and BPNN, 3.98%. Furthermore, Pearson correlation analysis showed that the relationship between electricity usage and mobility constraints is moderately correlated with a correlation value of -0.57. © 2022 WCSE. All Rights Reserved.

Solution of Solar Integrated Economic Load Dispatch Problems using COVID-19 Algorithm

Electrical power dispatch at a minimum cost of operation has been a challenging issue for thermal power stations and has research work has been carried out for decades. It has been observed that day by day resources of conventional energy are depleting so, the world is shifting towards renewable energy sources. This paper presents a novel technique COVID-19 Optimizer Algorithm (CVA) for solving the economic load dispatch problem of solar generation systems and thermal generating plants of a power system. The proposed method can be considered for solving the various types of economic load dispatch (ELD) problem considering numerous constraints viz. ramp rate limit & prohibited operating zones. Simulation results proved that the technique proposed performs way better than other modern optimization algorithms both in terms of quality of result obtained as well as computational efficiency. The robust nature of the CVA technique in solving solar integrated ELD problems can be inferred from the results. © 2022 IEEE.

A novel transfer deep learning model with reinforcement-learning-based hyperparameter optimization for short-term load forecasting during the COVID-19 pandemic

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has significantly impacted the world. The sudden decline in electricity load demand caused by strict social distancing restrictions has made it difficult for traditional models to forecast the load demand during the pandemic. Therefore, in this study, a novel transfer deep learning model with reinforcement-learning-based hyperparameter optimization is proposed for short-term load forecasting during the pandemic. First, a knowledge base containing mobility data is constructed, which can reflect the changes in visitor volume in different regions and buildings based on mobile services. Therefore, the sudden decline in load can be analyzed according to the socioeconomic behavior changes during the pandemic. Furthermore, a new transfer deep learning model is proposed to address the problem of limited mobility data associated with the pandemic. Moreover, reinforcement learning is employed to optimize the hyperparameters of the proposed model automatically, which avoids the manual adjustment of the hyperparameters, thereby maximizing the forecasting accuracy. To enhance the hyperparameter optimization efficiency of the reinforcement-learning agents, a new advance forecasting method is proposed to forecast the state-action values of the state space that have not been traversed. The experimental results on 12 real-world datasets covering different countries and cities demonstrate that the proposed model achieves high forecasting accuracy during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. © 2022 - IOS Press. All rights reserved.

Covid-19 Impact on Uttarakhand State Electricity Load Consumption and Generation

Due to the effect of Covid-19 the pattern of energy consumption of Uttarakhand State has affected during lockdown. Since the inception of Covid-19 in Uttarakhand there has drastic change in electricity consumption in thirteen districts of the State including Dehradun which is also a Smart City. It has reported that there is decrease in electricity consumption in the year 2020-21. In this study the long-term load forecasting using Artificial Neural Network is used as per the information released by Uttarakhand Electricity Regulatory Commission (UERC) in their tariff order for Financial Year 2021-22. There is eleven million population in Uttarakhand at present. During economic shutdown in Uttarakhand State the power utilities has faced the challenge of electricity generation, transmission, and distribution. It has been observed that during Covid-19 there is 939.97 million units generated energy loss has faced by power utilities companies in Uttarakhand. Uttarakhand is a emerging State where lots of new Technologies are in pipeline. In this Study the forecasted results is for nine years (2022-2030) which represents that there will be sudden rise in electricity consumption after 2025 to 2030 in Uttarakhand due to the intervention of electric vehicles. In Uttarakhand Dehradun is also a smart city where lots of IoT devices have been deployed across city which are are also consuming electricity. This study has reduced the forecast error upto 7.17 % so that there would be minimum revenue loss in future to the power utilities in Uttarakhand. © 2021 IEEE.

Short-Term Load Forecasting Model Considering the Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown in Bangladesh

The impact of COVID-19 lockdown on short-term load forecasting in Bangladesh has been investigated in this paper. Machine learning models have been proved to be the most efficient regarding such prediction. Models like Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Random Forest (RF) have been used in this study to build robust models taking the COVID-19 lockdown situation into account. Data sets for the models were formulated by taking daily generation reports, weather indicators and holidays. This study aims to compare different machine learning models to find out the best model for load forecasting keeping into account the impact of COVID-19 lockdown. The results of these methods have been compared based on accuracy metrics. It has been observed that LSTM shows the least error among the compared models. © 2021 IEEE.

Short-term power load forecasting during the COVID-19 pandemic using XGBoost and Copula theory

The global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has brought great challenges to the power systems due to its limitations on social, economic and productive activities. This paper proposes a short-term load forecasting method during COVID-19 pandemic based on copula theory and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). In this method, the coupling relationship among the cross-domain meteorological, public health, and mobility time-series data are fully analyzed based on copula theory, which is used for the short-term power load forecasting based on multi-factor fusion XGBoost algorithm. The proposed method has been fully evaluated and benchmarked on available cross-domain open-access United States data to demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority on short-term load forecasting of COVID-19. © 2021 IEEE

Day-Ahead Electricity Demand Forecasting Competition: Post-COVID Paradigm

The COVID-19 related shutdowns have made significant impacts on the electric grid operation worldwide. The global electrical demand plummeted around the planet in 2020 continuing into 2021. Moreover, demand shape has been profoundly altered as a result of industry shutdowns, business closures, and people working from home. In view of such massive electric demand changes, energy forecasting systems struggle to provide an accurate demand prediction, exposing operators to technical and financial risks, and further reinforcing the adverse economic impacts of the pandemic. In this context, the “IEEE DataPort Day-Ahead Electricity Demand Forecasting Competition: Post-COVID Paradigm" was organized to support the development and dissemination state-of-the-art load forecasting techniques that can mitigate the adverse impact of pandemic-related demand uncertainties. This paper presents the findings of this competition from the technical and organizational perspectives. The competition structure and participation statistics are provided, and the winning methods are summarized. Furthermore, the competition dataset and problem formulation is discussed in detail. Finally, the dataset is published along with this paper for reproducibility and further research. Author

Smoothed Bernstein Online Aggregation for Short-Term Load Forecasting in IEEE DataPort Competition on Day-Ahead Electricity Demand Forecasting: Post-COVID Paradigm

We present a winning method of the IEEE DataPort Competition on Day-Ahead Electricity Demand Forecasting: Post-COVID Paradigm. The day-ahead load forecasting approach is based on a novel online forecast combination of multiple point prediction models. It contains four steps: i) data cleaning and preprocessing, ii) a new holiday adjustment procedure, iii) training of individual forecasting models, iv) forecast combination by smoothed Bernstein Online Aggregation (BOA). The approach is flexible and can quickly adjust to new energy system situations as they occurred during and after COVID-19 shutdowns. The ensemble of individual prediction models ranges from simple time series models to sophisticated models like generalized additive models (GAMs) and high-dimensional linear models estimated by lasso. They incorporate autoregressive, calendar, and weather effects efficiently. All steps contain novel concepts that contribute to the excellent forecasting performance of the proposed method. It is especially true for the holiday adjustment procedure and the fully adaptive smoothed BOA approach. Author

An Ensemble Approach for Short-Term Load Forecasting for DISCOMS of Delhi Across the COVID-19 Scenario

The Covid-19 has presented unforeseen challenges to the world that has never been experienced before in history. None of the sectors remained unaffected witnessed various changes in their day-To-day operations. The impact has also been observed in the power sector, which can easily be illustrated with load fluctuations. The balancing of load supply in the energy sector is itself one of the critical complex tasks which becomes more vulnerable to deviation in case of these unforeseen events. Despite using advanced systems like machine learning artificial intelligence for load forecasting, utilities found the task challenging. This paper covers the impact of lockdown on load patterns of the Discoms of Delhi in the year 2020-21. The effect of weather on load is also analysed to demonstrate the critical correlation between them. The performance of the ensemble technique that has been proven beneficial for better load forecasting has outperformed other existing models, even in the current pandemic situation, has also been analysed validated through a comparative analysis against popular benchmark models. © 2021 IEEE.