Demand Forecasting in Smart Grid Using Long Short-Term Memory

Demand forecasting in power sector has become an important part of modern demand management and response systems with the rise of smart metering enabled grids. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) shows promising results in predicting time series data which can also be applied to power load demand in smart grids. In this paper, an LSTM based model using neural network architecture is proposed to forecast power demand. The model is trained with hourly energy and power usage data of four years from a smart grid. After training and prediction, the accuracy of the model is compared against the traditional statistical time series analysis algorithms, such as Auto-Regressive (AR), to determine the efficiency. The mean absolute percentile error is found to be 1.22 in the proposed LSTM model, which is the lowest among the other models. From the findings, it is clear that the inclusion of neural network in predicting power demand reduces the error of prediction significantly. Thus, the application of LSTM can enable a more efficient demand response system.