Deep neural networks for energy load forecasting

Smartgrids of the future promise unprecedented flexibility in energy management. Therefore, accurate predictions/forecasts of energy demands (loads) at individual site and aggregate level of the grid is crucial. Despite extensive research, load forecasting remains to be a difficult problem. This paper presents a load forecasting methodology based on deep learning. Specifically, the work presented in this paper investigates the effectiveness of using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for performing energy load forecasting at individual building level. The presented methodology uses convolutions on historical loads. The output from the convolutional operation is fed to fully connected layers together with other pertinent information. The presented methodology was implemented on a benchmark data set of electricity consumption for a single residential customer. Results obtained from the CNN were compared against results obtained by Long Short Term Memories LSTM sequence-to-sequence (LSTM S2S), Factored Restricted Boltzmann Machines (FCRBM), “shallow” Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) for the same dataset. Experimental results showed that the CNN outperformed SVR while producing comparable results to the ANN and deep learning methodologies. Further testing is required to compare the performances of different deep learning architectures in load forecasting.