Abstract:

A reliable and accurate short-term load forecasting (STLF) helps utilities and energy providers deal with the challenges posed by supply and demand balance, higher penetration of renewable energies and the development of electricity markets with increasingly complex pricing strategies in future smart grids. Recent advances in deep learning have been successively utilized to STLF. However, there is no certain study that evaluates the performances of different STLF methods at an aggregated level on different datasets with different numbers of daily measurements.In this study, a deep learning STLF architecture called Load2Load is proposed for day-ahead forecasting. Different forecasting methods have been evaluated and compared on two datasets with different temporal resolutions and features. An additive ensemble method as well as a selective ensemble method that selects the outputs of different forecasters in an hourly manner are proposed. Moreover; a modified sequential forward feature selection algorithm is proposed, resulting in better performance with a much smaller number of features.Numerical results show that the proposed Load2Load architecture has a competing performance compared to other advanced forecasters. When used together with the proposed ensemble methods, Load2Load can significantly improve the forecasting performance. The proposed feature selection algorithm results in better performance for the majority of the cases while reducing the dimensionality. According to the results with two different datasets; the proposed methods are shown to be robust to temporal resolutions, feature types and sequence lengths.

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