Short term electricity load forecasting: A case study of electric utility market in Turkey

With the recent developments in energy sector, the pricing of electricity is now governed by the spot market where a variety of market mechanisms are effective. After the new legislation of market liberalization in Turkey, competition-based on hourly price has received a growing interest in the energy market, which necessitated generators and electric utility companies to add new dimensions to their scope of operation: short-term load and price forecasting. The field has several opportunities though not free from challenges. The dynamic behavior of the market price has caused the electric load to become variable and non-stationary. Furthermore, the number of nodes, in which the load must be predicted, is not constant anymore and can no longer be estimated by experts alone. In this competitive scenario, statistical forecasting methods that can automatically and accurately process thousands of data samples are essential. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the importance of short-term load forecasting, how it has received a growing interest in Turkey and to propose an artificial neural network that can forecast the short term electricity load. Through detailed performance evaluations, we demonstrate that our forecasting method is capable of predicting the hourly load accurately.