Forecasting planned electricity consumption for the united power system using machine learning

The paper presents the results of studies of the predictive models development based on retrospective data on planned electricity consumption in the region with a significant share of enterprises in the mineral resource complex. Since the energy intensity of the industry remains quite high, the task of rationalizing the consumption of electricity is relevant. One of the ways to improve control accuracy when planning energy costs is to forecast electrical loads. Despite the large number of scientific papers on the topic of electricity consumption forecasting, this problem remains relevant due to the changing requirements of the wholesale electricity and power market to the accuracy of forecasts. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to support management decisions in the process of planning the volume of electricity consumption. To realize this, it is necessary to create a predictive model and determine the prospective power consumption of the power system. For this purpose, the collection and analysis of initial data, their preprocessing, selection of features, creation of models, and their optimization were carried out. The created models are based on historical data on planned power consumption, power system performance (frequency), as well as meteorological data. The research methods were: ensemble methods of machine learning (random forest, gradient boosting algorithms, such as XGBoost and CatBoost) and a long short-term memory recurrent neural network model (LSTM). The models obtained as a result of the conducted studies allow creating short-term forecasts of power consumption with a fairly high precision (for a period from one day to a week). The use of models based on gradient boosting algorithms and neural network models made it possible to obtain a forecast with an error of less than 1 %, which makes it possible to recommend the models described in the paper for use in forecasting the planned electricity power consumption of united power systems.