From the perspective of energy providers, accurate short-term load forecasting plays a significant role in the energy generation plan, efficient energy distribution process and electricity price strategy optimisation. However, it is hard to achieve a satisfactory result because the historical data is irregular, non-smooth, non-linear and noisy. To handle these challenges, in this work, we introduce a novel model based on the Transformer network to provide an accurate day-ahead load forecasting service. Our model contains a similar day selection approach involving the LightGBM and k-means algorithms. Compared to the traditional RNN-based model, our proposed model can avoid falling into the local minimum and outperforming the global search. To evaluate the performance of our proposed model, we set up a series of simulation experiments based on the energy consumption data in Australia. The performance of our model has an average MAPE (mean absolute percentage error) of 1.13, where RNN is 4.18, and LSTM is 1.93.

Sustainable energy management systems have been increasingly studied in recent years. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), as a key component, estimates the power consumption of individual appliances from the main readings only. However, most NILM approaches are computationally expensive, and their generality is negatively affected by the data drift occurred when the models are used across domains. Besides, the threats of privacy violation will rise in the model transfer due to the possible leakage of the personal information of the users from the source domain. To address all these challenges, we designed a cost-efficient learning method using LightGBM for energy disaggregation. We also proposed a model-based transfer learning algorithm using feature importance analysis, which enhances the generalisation capability of tree-based ensemble models applied in different domains while protecting privacy. We conducted experiments with real-world data sets. The performance of our approach is superior to the state-of-the-art solutions.

The increasing use of renewable energy sources and electrical energy storage systems creates a new energy paradigm for residential houses and buildings. Such design reduces carbon footprint, but it also introduces a new challenge for minimizing the electricity bill while still meeting users' needs. This challenge is often accompanied by deep uncertainty in user load demands, electricity tariffs, and renewable energy generations. To address this challenge, we propose an online algorithm, Virtual Algorithm-based Lightweight Online Scheduling (VALOS), to manage electricity purchasing and battery operations. Our solution does not use any prediction components in dealing with uncertainties. Instead, our algorithm employs a lightweight routine, Virtual Algorithm (VA), for making critical decisions to manage uncertainty. We prove that VA achieves an expected probability of 1/e for choosing the optimal purchasing timing online and incurs only a logarithmic computational cost. With VA, VALOS decides how the energy storage reacts to the load demands, which incurs only a linear-logarithmic online computational cost while achieving optimal performance under the specified conditions. Finally, we conduct extensive trace-driven simulations on real-world datasets to confirm the theoretical results and demonstrate the potential of VALOS.