Short-Term Load Forecasting on Individual Consumers

Maintaining stability and control over the electric system requires increasing information about the consumers' profiling due to changes in the form of electricity generation and consumption. To overcome this trouble, short-term load forecasting (STLF) on individual consumers gained importance in the last years. Nonetheless, predicting the profile of an individual consumer is a difficult task. The main challenge lies in the uncertainty related to the individual consumption profile, which increases forecasting errors. Thus, this paper aims to implement a load predictive model focused on individual consumers taking into account its randomness. For this purpose, a methodology is proposed to determine and select predictive features for individual STLF. The load forecasting of an individual consumer is simulated based on the four main machine learning techniques used in the literature. A 2.73% reduction in the forecast error is obtained after the correct selection of the predictive features. Compared to the baseline model (persistent forecasting method), the error is reduced by up to 19.8%. Among the techniques analyzed, support vector regression (SVR) showed the smallest errors (8.88% and 9.31%).