Analysis and enhanced prediction of the Spanish Electricity Network through Big Data and Machine Learning techniques

Forecasting of Electrical Energy Consumption in Slovakia

Prediction of electricity energy consumption plays a crucial role in the electric power industry. Accurate forecasting is essential for electricity supply policies. A characteristic feature of electrical energy is the need to ensure a constant balance between consumption and electricity production, whereas electricity cannot be stored in significant quantities, nor is it easy to transport. Electricity consumption generally has a stochastic behavior that makes it hard to predict. The main goal of this study is to propose the forecasting models to predict the maximum hourly electricity consumption per day that is more accurate than the official load prediction of the Slovak Distribution Company. Different models are proposed and compared. The first model group is based on the transverse set of Grey models and Nonlinear Grey Bernoulli models and the second approach is based on a multi-layer feed-forward back-propagation network. Moreover, a new potential hybrid model combining these different approaches is used to forecast the maximum hourly electricity consumption per day. Various performance metrics are adopted to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of models. All the proposed models achieved more accurate predictions than the official load prediction, while the hybrid model offered the best results according to performance metrics and supported the legitimacy of this research.

A deep LSTM network for the Spanish electricity consumption forecasting

Nowadays, electricity is a basic commodity necessary for the well-being of any modern society. Due to the growth in electricity consumption in recent years, mainly in large cities, electricity forecasting is key to the management of an efficient, sustainable and safe smart grid for the consumer. In this work, a deep neural network is proposed to address the electricity consumption forecasting in the short-term, namely, a long short-term memory (LSTM) network due to its ability to deal with sequential data such as time-series data. First, the optimal values for certain hyper-parameters have been obtained by a random search and a metaheuristic, called coronavirus optimization algorithm (CVOA), based on the propagation of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Then, the optimal LSTM has been applied to predict the electricity demand with 4-h forecast horizon. Results using Spanish electricity data during nine years and half measured with 10-min frequency are presented and discussed. Finally, the performance of the proposed LSTM using random search and the LSTM using CVOA is compared, on the one hand, with that of recently published deep neural networks (such as a deep feed-forward neural network optimized with a grid search) and temporal fusion transformers optimized with a sampling algorithm, and, on the other hand, with traditional machine learning techniques, such as a linear regression, decision trees and tree-based ensemble techniques (gradient-boosted trees and random forest), achieving the smallest prediction error below 1.5%.