Individual and aggregate electrical load forecasting: One for all and all for one

Abstract

Electrical load forecasting is an important task for utility companies, in order to plan future production and to increase the efficiency of the distribution network. Although load forecasting at the aggregate level has been extensively studied in existing literature, forecasts for individual consumers have been shown to be prone to errors. This paper deals with the problem of electrical load forecasting at multiple scales, from individual consumers to the network as a whole. We use smart meter data from carefully selected sets of consumers for this purpose. First, we consider the problem of forecasting the load for individual consumers at the outermost nodes of the distribution network. We propose an algorithm which considers external available information like calendar or weather contexts along with the energy consumption profiles of different consumers for accurate mid-term and short-term load forecasting. Multiple aggregation approaches are considered for utility level forecasting, in order to characterize their error properties. We show that careful clustering of consumers for aggregation can result in smaller errors. We experiment with two public data sets for demonstrating the advantages of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art approaches.