Prediction Models for Short-Term Load and Production Forecasting in Smart Electrical Grids

The scheduling of household smart load devices play a key role in microgrid ecosystems, and particularly in underpowered grids. The management and sustainability of these microgrids could benefit from the application of short-term prediction for the energy production and demand, which have been successfully applied and matured in larger scale systems, namely national power grids. However, the dynamic change of energy demand, due to the necessary adjustments aiming to render the microgrid self-sustainability, makes the forecasting process harder. This paper analyses some prediction techniques to be embedded in intelligent and distributed agents responsible to manage electrical microgrids, and especially increase their self-sustainability. These prediction techniques are implemented in R language and compared according to different prediction and historical data horizons. The experimental results shows that none is the optimal solution for all criteria, but allow to identify the best prediction techniques for each scenario and time scope.