Smart metering is a quite new topic that has grown in importance all over the world and it appears to be a remedy for rising prices of electricity. Forecasting electricity usage is an important task to provide intelligence to the smart gird. Accurate forecasting will enable a utility provider to plan the resources and also to take control actions to balance the electricity supply and demand. The customers will benefit from metering solutions through greater understanding of their own energy consumption and future projections, allowing them to better manage costs of their usage. In this proof of concept paper, our contribution is the proposal for accurate short term electricity load forecasting for 24hours ahead, not on the aggregate but on the individual household level

Leveraging smart metering solutions to support energy efficiency on the individual household level poses novel research challenges in monitoring usage and providing accurate load forecasting. Forecasting electricity usage is an especially important component that can provide intelligence to smart meters. In this paper, we propose an enhanced approach for load forecasting at the household level. The impacts of residents’ daily activities and appliance usages on the power consumption of the entire household are incorporated to improve the accuracy of the forecasting model. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) we addressed short-term electricity load forecasting for 24 hours ahead, not on the aggregate but on the individual household level, which fits into the Residential Power Load Forecasting (RPLF) methods; (2) for the forecasting, we utilized a household specific dataset of behaviors that influence power consumption, which was derived using segmentation and sequence mining algorithms; and (3) an extensive load forecasting study using different forecasting algorithms enhanced by the household activity patterns was undertaken.

The main goal of this research is to discover the structure of home appliances usage patterns, hence providing more intelligence in smart metering systems by taking into account the usage of selected home appliances and the time of their usage. In particular, we present and apply a set of unsupervised machine learning techniques to reveal specific usage patterns observed at an individual household. The work delivers the solutions applicable in smart metering systems that might: (1) contribute to higher energy awareness; (2) support accurate usage forecasting; and (3) provide the input for demand response systems in homes with timely energy saving recommendations for users. The results provided in this paper show that determining household characteristics from smart meter data is feasible and allows for quickly grasping general trends in data.

Forecasting of electricity demand has become one of the most important areas of research in the electric power industry, as it is a critical component of cost-efficient power system management and planning. In this context, accurate and robust load forecasting is supposed to play a key role in reducing generation costs, and deals with the reliability of the power system. However, due to demand peaks in the power system, forecasts are inaccurate and prone to high numbers of errors. In this paper, our contributions comprise a proposed data-mining scheme for demand modeling through peak detection, as well as the use of this information to feed the forecasting system. For this purpose, we have taken a different approach from that of time series forecasting, representing it as a two-stage pattern recognition problem. We have developed a peak classification model followed by a forecasting model to estimate an aggregated demand volume. We have utilized a set of machine learning algorithms to benefit from both accurate detection of the peaks and precise forecasts, as applied to the Polish power system. The key finding is that the algorithms can detect 96.3% of electricity peaks (load value equal to or above the 99th percentile of the load distribution) and deliver accurate forecasts, with mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 3.10% and resistant mean absolute percentage error (r-MAPE) of 2.70% for the 24 h forecasting horizon.

Smart metering is a quite new topic that has grown in importance all over the world and it appears to be a remedy for rising prices of electricity. Forecasting electricity usage is an important task to provide intelligence to the smart gird. Accurate forecasting will enable a utility provider to plan the resources and also to take control actions to balance the electricity supply and demand. The customers will benefit from metering solutions through greater understanding of their own energy consumption and future projections, allowing them to better manage costs of their usage. In this proof of concept paper, our contribution is twofold: (1) we deal with short term electricity load forecasting for 24 hours ahead, not on the aggregate but on the individual household level what fits into the stream of Residential Power Load Forecasting (RPLF) methods; (2) we utilized a set of household behavioral data which significantly improved the forecasts accuracy.