A Stacked GRU-RNN-Based Approach for Predicting Renewable Energy and Electricity Load for Smart Grid Operation

Predictions of renewable energy (RE) generation and electricity load are critical to smart grid operation. However, the prediction task remains challenging due to the intermittent and chaotic character of RE sources, and the diverse user behavior and power consumers. This article presents a novel method for the prediction of RE generation and electricity load using improved stacked gated recurrent unit-recurrent neural network (GRU-RNN) for both univariate and multivariate scenarios. First, multiple sensitive monitoring parameters or historical electricity consumption data are selected according to the correlation analysis to form the input data. Second, a stacked GRU-RNN using a simplified GRU is constructed with improved training algorithm based on AdaGrad and adjustable momentum. The modified GRU-RNN structure and improved training method enhance training efficiency and robustness. Third, the stacked GRU-RNN is used to establish an accurate mapping between the selected variables and RE generation or electricity load due to its self-feedback connections and improved training mechanism. The proposed method is verified by using two experiments: prediction of wind power generation using multiple weather parameters and prediction of electricity load with historical energy consumption data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods of machine learning or deep learning in achieving an accurate energy prediction for effective smart grid operation.