Day-ahead forecasting of losses in the distribution network

Abstract

Utility companies in the Nordics have to nominate how much electricity is expected to be lost in their power grid the next day. We present a commercially deployed machine learning system that automates this day-ahead nomination of the expected grid loss. It meets several practical constraints and issues related to, among other things, delayed, missing and incorrect data and a small data set. The system incorporates a total of 24 different models that performs forecasts for three sub-grids. Each day one model is selected for making the hourly day-ahead forecasts for each sub-grid. The deployed system reduced the mean average percentage error (MAPE) with 40% from 12.17 to 7.26 per hour from mid-July to mid-October, 2019. It is robust, flexible and reduces manual work. Recently, the system was deployed to forecast and nominate grid losses for two new grids belonging to a new customer. As the presented system is modular and adaptive, the integration was quick and needed minimal work. We have shared the grid loss data-set on Kaggle.