Short-Term Electricity Generation Forecasting Using Machine Learning Algorithms: A Case Study of the Benin Electricity Community (C.E.B)

Time series forecasting in the energy sector is important to power utilities for decision making to ensure the sustainability and quality of electricity supply, and the stability of the power grid. Unfortunately, the presence of certain exogenous factors such as weather conditions, electricity price complicate the task using linear regression models that are becoming unsuitable. The search for a robust predictor would be an invaluable asset for electricity companies. To overcome this difficulty, Artificial Intelligence differs from these prediction methods through the Machine Learning algorithms which have been performing over the last decades in predicting time series on several levels. This work proposes the deployment of three univariate Machine Learning models: Support Vector Regression, Multi-Layer Perceptron, and the Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network to predict the electricity production of Benin Electricity Community. In order to validate the performance of these different methods, against the Autoregressive Integrated Mobile Average and Multiple Regression model, performance metrics were used. Overall, the results show that the Machine Learning models outperform the linear regression methods. Consequently, Machine Learning methods offer a perspective for short-term electric power generation forecasting of Benin Electricity Community sources.