Forecasting renewable energy consumption under zero assumptions

Abstract

Renewable energy, as an environmentally friendly and sustainable source of energy, is key to realizing the nationally determined contributions of the United States (US) to the December 2015 Paris agreement. Policymakers in the US rely on energy forecasts to draft and implement cost-minimizing, efficient and realistic renewable and sustainable energy policies but the inaccuracies in past projections are considerably high. The inaccuracies and inconsistencies in forecasts are due to the numerous factors considered, massive assumptions and modeling flaws in the underlying model. Here, we propose and apply a machine learning forecasting algorithm devoid of massive independent variables and assumptions to model and forecast renewable energy consumption (REC) in the US. We employ the forecasting technique to make projections on REC from biomass (REC-BMs) and hydroelectric (HE-EC) sources for the 2009-2016 period. We find that, relative to reference case projections in Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Outlook 2008, projections based on our proposed technique present an enormous improvement up to ~138.26-fold on REC-BMs and ~24.67-fold on HE-EC; and that applying our technique saves the US ~2692.62 PJ petajoules (PJ) on HE-EC and ~9695.09 PJ on REC-BMs for the 8-year forecast period. The achieved high-accuracy is also replicable to other regions.