Zero-shot Load Forecasting for Integrated Energy Systems: A Large Language Model-based Framework with Multi-task Learning

The growing penetration of renewable energy sources in power systems has increased the complexity and uncertainty of load forecasting, especially for integrated energy systems with multiple energy carriers. Traditional forecasting methods heavily rely on historical data and exhibit limited transferability across different scenarios, posing significant challenges for emerging applications in smart grids and energy internet. This paper proposes the TSLLM-Load Forecasting Mechanism, a novel zero-shot load forecasting framework based on large language models (LLMs) to address these challenges. The framework consists of three key components: a data preprocessing module that handles multi-source energy load data, a time series prompt generation module that bridges the semantic gap between energy data and LLMs through multi-task learning and similarity alignment, and a prediction module that leverages pre-trained LLMs for accurate forecasting. The framework's effectiveness was validated on a real-world dataset comprising load profiles from 20 Australian solar-powered households, demonstrating superior performance in both conventional and zero-shot scenarios. In conventional testing, our method achieved a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.4163 and a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.3760, outperforming existing approaches by at least 8%. In zero-shot prediction experiments across 19 households, the framework maintained consistent accuracy with a total MSE of 11.2712 and MAE of 7.6709, showing at least 12% improvement over current methods. The results validate the framework's potential for accurate and transferable load forecasting in integrated energy systems, particularly beneficial for renewable energy integration and smart grid applications.