Estimating electricity consumption at city-level through advanced machine learning methods

An effective energy management system relies on the accurate prediction of electricity consumption, facilitating energy suppliers to optimise energy distribution, reduce energy waste, and avoid overloading the power system. This paper analyses different methods for the estimation of electricity consumption at the level of an urban area. A statistical model based on Trigonometric seasonality, Box-Cox transformation, Auto-Regressive Moving Average errors, Trend and Seasonal components is first presented. Then a model based on fuzzy logic is also proposed. These methods will be optimised and evaluated on a dataset collected by the electric power supply agency of Sibiu, Romania, with the goal of reducing the forecast error. The models are also compared with a Markov stochastic model and with a Long Short-Term Memory neural model. The experiments have shown that our statistical model using a history length of 200 electricity consumption values and a daily seasonality is the most efficient, with the lowest mean absolute error of 3.6 MWh, thus making it a good candidate for integration into a city-level energy management system.