Electricity Consumption Databases and Contribution of a New Equatorial Dataset from Ecuador for Load Forecasting Applications

Accurate electricity consumption forecasting is essential for the efficient planning and operation of modern power systems. The development of predictive models based on machine learning and deep learning strongly depends on the availability of well-documented and publicly accessible electricity consumption datasets. However, most existing databases are concentrated in Europe and North America and are typically focused on residential measurements obtained from smart meters, resulting in limited representation of equatorial regions. This work presents a structured review of public electricity consumption repositories, analyzing characteristics such as geographical coverage, temporal resolution, user type, and accessibility. Based on the limitations identified in the literature, a new electricity consumption dataset obtained from real measurements collected at distribution substations located in an equatorial region is presented. The dataset was organized through a systematic preprocessing workflow that included temporal standardization, construction of 48-hour sliding windows, normalization, and stratified partitioning into training, validation, and test subsets. The descriptive statistical analysis confirms the consistency of the generated subsets and reveals differences between working-day and non-working-day consumption patterns. The proposed dataset provides a reproducible resource for the development and evaluation of multi-horizon electricity demand forecasting models, as well as for load analysis and energy management studies in equatorial regions.