Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment Day-Ahead Power Forecast Based on Deep Learning and the Attention Mechanism

Transports is one of the sectors that produce the highest emissions of CO2; in the last ten years, there has been a process of decarbonization which has led to a considerable increase in Electric Vehicles (EVs). However, the sudden introduction of a large number of Electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) supplying electrical energy to EVs could cause problems in the management of the electric grid which must cope with the consequent increase in the electrical load demand. In this context, the 24 hour ahead forecast of the power curve associated with the recharge of EVs becomes of vital importance to ensure the reliability of the electric grid. In this paper, different Machine Learning models based on Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM, GRU) and with different architectures, are compared based on their capability to accurately predict the power curve of an EV charging station one day in advance. A Sequence to Sequence model has been implemented and a thorough analysis of an Attention layer has been detailed. The models are tested on a real world open dataset.