Deep Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory for Electric Power Load Forecasting

Forecasting domestic and foreign power demand is crucial for planning the operation and expansion of facilities. Power demand patterns are very complex owing to energy market deregulation. Therefore, developing an appropriate power forecasting model for an electrical grid is challenging. In particular, when consumers use power irregularly, the utility cannot accurately predict short- and long-term power consumption. Utilities that experience short- and long-term power demands cannot operate power supplies reliably; in worst-case scenarios, blackouts occur. Therefore, the utility must predict the power demands by analyzing the customers’ power consumption patterns for power supply stabilization. For this, a medium- and long-term power forecasting is proposed. The electricity demand forecast was divided into medium-term and long-term load forecast for customers with different power consumption patterns. Among various deep learning methods, deep neural networks (DNNs) and long short-term memory (LSTM) were employed for the time series prediction. The DNN and LSTM performances were compared to verify the proposed model. The two models were tested, and the results were examined with the accuracies of the six most commonly used evaluation measures in the medium- and long-term electric power load forecasting. The DNN outperformed the LSTM, regardless of the customer’s power pattern.