Wholesale Electricity Price Forecasting using Integrated Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network Model

Electricity price is a key factor affecting the decision-making for all market participants. Accurate forecasting of electricity prices is very important and is also very challenging since electricity price is highly volatile due to various factors. This paper proposes an integrated long-term recurrent convolutional network (ILRCN) model to predict electricity prices considering the majority contributing attributes to the market price as input. The proposed ILRCN model combines the functionalities of convolutional neural network and long short-term memory (LSTM) algorithm along with the proposed novel conditional error correction term. The combined ILRCN model can identify the linear and non-linear behavior within the input data. We have used ERCOT wholesale market price data along with load profile, temperature, and other factors for the Houston region to illustrate the proposed model. The performance of the proposed ILRCN electricity price forecasting model is verified using performance/evaluation metrics like mean absolute error and accuracy. Case studies reveal that the proposed ILRCN model is accurate and efficient in electricity price forecasting as compared to the support vector machine (SVM) model, fully-connected neural network model, LSTM model and the LRCN model without the conditional error correction stage.