Comparative analysis of residential load forecasting with different levels of aggregation

Abstract

Microgrids need a robust residential load forecasting. As a consequence, this highlights the problem of predicting electricity consumption in small amounts of households. The individual demand curve is volatile, and more difficult to forecast than the aggregated demand curve. For this reason, Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) varies in a large range (of 1% to 45%), depending on the number of consumers analyzed. Different levels of aggregation of household consumers that can be used in microgrids are analyzed; the load forecasting of the single consumer and aggregated consumers are compared. The forecasting methodology used is the most consolidated of Recurrent Neural Networks, i.e., LSTM. The dataset used contains 920 residential consumers belonging to the Commission for Energy Regulation (CER), a control group that is in the Irish Social Science Data Archive (ISSDA) repository. The result shows that the forecasting of groups of more than 20 aggregated consumers has a lower MAPE that individual forecasting. On the other hand, individual forecasting is better for groups with fewer than 10 consumers.