A New Approach for Long Term Electricity Load Forecasting for Uttarakhand State Power Utilities using Artificial Neural Network

Uttarakhand being a hill state has come into existence on 9
^th
November 2000 as 27th State of India. The State is rich in natural flora and fauna. The State is full of hydropower potential with a capacity of 24,551 Mega Watt. At present only 60% power is generated from its total potential due to challenge in capacity installation of hydro power projects. The remaining requirement is covered from Central Government Energy Projects and Energy Exchange through Long Term Power Purchase Agreement. At present in Uttarakhand daily consumption of electricity is 35 Million Units. The distribution company has reported loss of 987 Crore in last tariff order of Uttarakhand Electricity Regulatory Commission. This study is conducted by considering the fact of power shortage for Long Terms in Uttarakhand State. In this study Artificial Neural Network method is used for forecasting the energy requirement for six years from 2022 to 2028. In Artificial Neural Network the three-layered feed forward structure is used to forecast the results. The structure has three layers namely input, hidden and output layer. It has been analyzed that the power consumption from 2025 onwards is increasing gradually due to the energy requirement of Electric Vehicle Charging infrastructure and implementation of infrastructure projects in Uttarakhand. It is one another fact that the hydropower potential needs to be scaled up for meeting the future requirement. The Uttarakhand State cannot depend on Central Energy Exchange for drawing costly power every time. This study will help energy planners to plan the capacity installation of Hydro and Solar power in Uttarakhand State.