Machine learning based electric load forecasting for short and long-term period

Electricity is currently the most important energy vector in the domestic sector and industry. Unlike fuels, electricity is hard and expensive to store. This creates the need of precise coupling between generation and demand. In addition, the transmission lines of electric power need to be sized for a given maximum power, and overloading them may result in blackout or electrical accidents. For these reasons, energy consumption forecasting is vital. The time scale for forecasting depends on who is interested in such prediction. Grid operators have to predict the electricity demand for the next day, to program the generation accordingly. Grid designers have to predict energy consumption at the scale of years, to ensure that the infrastructure is sufficient. On the other hand, smart grid controllers with almost instant response time may need a prediction on the order of minutes. We have seen that changing the time scale in electricity load forecasting changes the approach, and that depending on the scale different methods should be used to ensure the highest accuracy with the smallest computational cost. We show here how forecasting accuracy decreases with the increase of time scale due to the impossibility of using of all variables. Several well established computational models were compared on three different regression based criteria and the results revealed that boosting model was able to outperform their competitors in most of the comparisons.