Short-Term Electricity Demand Forecasting Using Deep Neural Networks: An Analysis for Thai Data

Abstract

Electricity demand forecasting plays a significant role in energy markets. Accurate prediction of electricity demand is the key factor in optimizing power generation and consumption, saving energy resources, and determining energy prices. However, integrating energy mix scenarios, including solar and wind power, which are highly nonlinear and seasonal, into an existing grid increases the uncertainty of generation, creating additional challenges for precise forecasting. To tackle such challenges, state-of-the-art methods and algorithms have been implemented in the literature. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based deep learning models can effectively handle the information of long time-series data. Based on patterns identified in datasets, various scenarios can be developed. In this paper, several models were constructed and tested using deep AI networks in two different scenarios: Scenario1 used data for weekdays, excluding holidays, while Scenario2 used the data without exclusion. To find the optimal configuration, the models were trained and tested within a large space of alternative hyperparameters. We used an Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-based Feedforward Neural Network (FNN) to show the minimum prediction error for Scenario1 and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based Gated Recurrent Network (GRU) to show the minimum prediction error for Scenario2. From our results, it can be concluded that the weekday dataset in Scenario1 prepared by excluding weekends and holidays provides better forecasting accuracy compared to the holistic dataset approach used in Scenario2. However, Scenario2 is necessary for predicting the demand on weekends and holidays.