Machine learning model to predict electricity demand and thermal generation during the pandemic

Owing to the global lockdown caused by the pandemic of COVID-19, the electricity demand is greatly affected, and the electricity market is also constantly fluctuating. During the pandemic period, the prediction of electricity demand is crucial to the economy and power dispatching. In this study, we combine the pandemic data and government anti-pandemic policies data to predict the electricity demand of the Contiguous United States by using the artificial neural network and recurrent neural network. In addition, the linear regression method is used to forecast the thermal generation with total generation data. Some experiments have developed to verify the effectiveness of the model. Then the model is used to forecast electricity demand and thermal generation under different policies and pandemic development, and the result were analyzed.