An Economic Analysis of Energy Consumption at Student Residences in a South African-Based Academic Institution Using NARX Neural Network

Abstract

One of the issues associated with the supply of electricity is its generation capacity, and this has led to prevalent power cuts and high costs of usage experienced in many developing nations, including South Africa. Historical research has shown that the annual rate of increase for electricity has grown at an alarming rate since 2008 and, in some years, has grown as much as 16%. The objectives of this study are to estimate the cost analysis of electricity usage at the twenty-nine residences of the University of Johannesburg (UJ-Res) and propose a model for our university, as well as other South African universities, to become more energy-efficient. This was achieved by analyzing the tariffs between 2015 and 2021. A forecast was made for a period of five years (2021 to 2026) using a non-linear autoregressive exogenous neural network (NARX-NN) time-series model. From the results obtained, the better NARX-NN model studied has a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 2.47 × 105 and a determination coefficient (R2) of 0.9661. The projection result also shows that the annual cost of energy consumed will increase for the projected years, with the year 2022 being the peak with an estimated annual cost of over ZAR 30 million (USD 2,076,268).