Electrical Load Forecasting Using Hijri Causal Events

The Electric load supply industry requires forecasts with lead times that range from short terms (a few hours, or days ahead) to long terms (up to 10 years ahead). Load forecasting is a complex task because of high non-linearity relation among load variables and load exhibits several levels of seasonality. This paper presents the effect of Hijri calendar on load forecasting. Hijri calendar could be useful on different time horizon. In Middle East region, most countries are influenced by different Islamic Hijri calendar (i.e. Ramadan, religious holidays, weekend, Friday, and different workday). Only during Ramadan, many casual events occurred such as workday changing, fasting, and more usage for air conditioning during the whole month. The peak load in Ramadan differs from other months on the workdays. Based on our experiments when forecasting north Cairo electric load, the forecasting accuracy is increased when including casual Hijri events. Moreover, including casual Hijri events results in a large decrease in the forecasting errors; RMSE, MAE and MAPE.