Autonomous Hybrid Forecast Framework to Predict Electricity Demand

The increasing complexity of integrated energy systems with the electric power grid requires innovative control solutions for efficient management of smart buildings and distributed energy resources. Accurately predicting weather conditions and electricity demand is crucial to make such informed decisions. Machine learning has emerged as a powerful solution to enhance prediction accuracy by harnessing advanced algorithms, but often requires complex parameterizations and ongoing model updates. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Autonomous Forecast Framework (AFF) was developed to greatly simplify this process, providing reliable and accurate forecasts with minimal user interaction, by automatically selecting the best model out of a library of candidate models. This work expands on the AFF by not only selecting the best model, but assembling a blend of multiple models into a hybrid forecast model. The validation within this work has shown that this combination of models outperformed the selected best model of the AFF 31%, while providing greater resilience to individual model’s forecast error.