1. Introduction
An accurate load power forecasting plays an important role in maintaining the stability and safety of a power system [
1,
2,
3]. Moreover, operational decisions in power systems like maintenance scheduling are really dependent on the behavior of the load pattern itself [
3]. Especially with good forecasting results, the electric power company can provide sufficient power to the loads under unexpected large operation conditions change, for example, sudden temperature decrease in winter or increase in summer. Note that if such a situation is not well handled, partial or total blackout can take place. The application of load power forecasting is not only to maintain the safety of power system operation but also to assist the scheduling of storage facilities. Load power forecasting is also used as another parameter to make better system marginal price (SMP) forecasting in order to maximize profit between the electrical power company and consumer [
4]. Load forecasting really depends on many aspects, especially nature parameter, because of the weather-sensitive load. Hence, an accurate weather prediction like temperature or humidity can improve the performance of load forecasting.
The daily temperature is one of the important natural parameters that give an impact on the amount of daily load demand [
2]. Accordingly, it is important to consider temperature as another input parameter in addition to past load demand for load forecasting because of its relevancy. Researchers used the relevance between temperature and load demand for forecasting by using statistical methods until advanced methods like artificial intelligence were developed [
1,
2,
3,
5,
6,
7,
8]. Load power forecasting using historical load demand and also temperature as the input parameter was shown to be a precisely good forecasting result [
1,
2,
3].
Another application of load demand forecasting is SMP prediction. Nowadays, power generation is moving from centralized to decentralized operation. It means many electrical power companies generate their own electricity and sell it to their customers at various prices. They submit their own electricity bidding price at a competitive rate that makes a great market competition among the other companies. So undoubtedly, good SMP prediction can help both electrical power companies and also consumers gain their maximum benefits based on the SMP forecasting. Since load power demand and SMP are closely related to each other, load power demand needs to be considered in order to determine the exact SMP on a specific hour. There are three main parts to determine the SMP in a specific time on single-round auctions [
4]. The electrical power producer makes its own generation bidding price and also electricity consumers make their own bidding price. After that, there is a market-clearing tool that has a task to clear the price market and to determine the SMP on one specific time that has been accepted by production and consumption companies. In view of such a procedure, load forecasting is important for both electric power producers and customers.
Owing to its significance, there are many approaches to do load forecasting in the literature. Well-known statistical methods used for load forecasting are simple moving average (SMA), exponential smoothing (SES), and autoregressive integration moving average (ARIMA) to name a few [
9]. Those statistical methods have their own speciality. The SMA calculates a simple moving average for the last
n values. In the exponential smoothing, it provides a way to make a smooth forecasting by removing noises from the data so that it would give a better forecasting result. The ARIMA method forecasts future values based on past values of the signal under consideration using a time series property. Besides statistical method, artificial intelligence (AI) method is also used for forecasting. Due to its universal approximation property, AI based methods show good performance compared with statistical methods for the case where the signal is generated by a very complicated mechanism. Combining statistical and artificial intelligence methods to forecast load power in a single process is proposed in order to take advantage of each method [
6]. The basic support vector machine (SVM) method is used to forecast the load for the next 24 h by using historical load and temperature while artificial neural network (ANN) is used to extract the components from the historical valley and peak data of load power and temperature [
6]. A comparative analysis is done between auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), ANN and adaptive neuro-fuzzy to determine which method has the best capability to forecast load power. Historical load power data is set as the only input to each method with different time sampling [
7]. The support vector regression (SVR) method is used to forecast load power every 5 min by using historical load power data as the input and comparing it to the back-propagation neural network (BPNN) algorithm [
8]. Historical data of both load demand and temperature are utilized for the sake of load forecasting using a machine learning technique [
3,
5]. A support vector regression based method uses an algebraic method for load prediction and the SVR method is used to compensate for the load prediction result [
3]. Another machine learning technique like a not-fully connected ANN is used to reduce the training time compared to a fully connected ANN [
2]. In [
5], a part of real past data is extracted to enhance the accuracy of the load prediction.
In the literature, there are many approaches to SMP forecasting developed by researchers. In [
4], a time series analysis based method is proposed to forecast electricity price and, for the purpose, dynamic regression and transfer function model are utilized. A method using the linear programming is proposed to make a model for real-time electricity pricing with a motivation to reduce the electricity expenditure of the customer optimally [
10]. In addition to the mathematical and statistical methods, machine learning based approaches are also used for electricity price forecasting. For instance, only using historical SMP data as the main predictor, ref. [
11] natural gas and oil price are also considered as another predictor to enhance electricity price forecasting because of its strong relation to SMP data in a country with majority of oil and gas power plant. The main result in [
12] forecasts SMP by considering oil and gas price as additional predictors in an SVM model. Another simulation proposes a one-day ahead of SMP forecasting and they increase the prediction accuracy especially during a peak time by utilizing a weekly variation of SMP data [
13]. In order to enhance forecasting results, a modern technique like deep learning is also utilized for short-term SMP forecasting because of the well-known capability of deep learning to analyze non-linear data [
14,
15]. In addition, recurrent neural network (RNN) and also long short-term memory (LSTM) network are used as other forecasting methods because of their outstanding capability to predict time-dependent data compared to general MLP [
16].
It is reported that load power is closely related to SMP forecasting [
15,
17]. This paper intends to utilize the load power forecasting to enhance SMP forecasting by using both LSTM and MLP. This paper focuses on enhancing short-term load demand forecasting by using partial real-time information on top of historical load demand and temperature data. SMP forecasting as its application will also be enhanced by using this load forecasting result. The partial real-time information means the temperature information for a part of the whole forecast period. In other words, only partial temperature information will be used in the MLP to compensate for the load forecasting. In addition to these, this paper uses the relation between
(load power variation) and
(temperature variation) from their past data. In other words, from the past data on load demand and temperature, the load changes induced by temperature changes is investigated. Based on these data, at first an LSTM is trained using the past data on load and temperature to forecast the next 24 h load power. In addition, an MLP is trained using the relation between past
(load power variation) and
(temperature variation) in order to compute
(i.e., amount of compensation) with measured
. This measured
is called the partial real-time information in this paper, which means the difference between the temperature prediction and the temperature measurement over the initial part of the entire prediction time interval. A similar method is applied to SMP prediction in order to enhance its performance. The proposed method is implemented using real temperature, load data, and SMP data from South Korea and the numerical simulations show that the performance of the load and SMP forecasting are indeed improved.
5. Conclusions
In this paper, it was presented how to use real-time information of temperature and load demand in order to compensate the load and SMP forecasting generated by LSTM using past load demand and SMP data. For the purpose, first an LSTM is trained using the past load and SMP data and their forecast is made using the trained LSTM. Then from the past load demand and SMP data, it is found out how the temperature variation affects load demand variations and the load variations influence the SMP variations. This finding is used to train an MLP. Hence, the trained MLP can generate load demand variation forecast when the temperature variation is given and SMP variation forecast when the load demand variation is given. Finally, when the real-time temperature and load demand are available, the MLP is used to predict the load demand and SMP variation. The predicted values are used to compensate load demand and SMP forecasts by the LSTM. In addition to this, it is shown how to use the trained MLP in predicting load demand and SMP variations for an arbitrary temperature variation.
Future research includes how to make a simpler deep learning structure compared with the two steps structure in the proposed method. In addition, it would be useful to develop a method on how to use the proposed load forecast in energy storage system (ESS) scheduling for the purpose of safe grid operation. In addition, reinforcement learning based grid scheduling with the proposed load forecast method is also a possible application.