A novel artificial neural network model for forecasting electricity demand enhanced with population-weighted temperature mean and the unemployment rate

Abstract

Precise electricity demand forecasting has principal significance in the energy production planning of the developing countries. Especially during the last decade, numerous recent methods have been utilized to predict the forthcoming electricity demand in different time resolutions accurately. This contribution presents a novel approach, which improves the forecasting of Turkey’s electricity demand in monthly time resolution. An artificial neural network model has been proposed with appropriate input features. Yearly-based gross demand shows approximately linear increment due to population increase and economic growth, while monthly-based gross demand indicates an oscillation due to the effect of seasonal temperature fluctuations. However, there is no clear linear relation between electricity demand and temperature; for the ideal case, it is the V-shaped curve around balance point temperature. Since temperature levels in each region of the country demonstrate a high variance even in the same time period, weighted average temperature point was calculated with respect to the population weights of the selected regions of Turkey. In order to fit a function for monthly oscillations, a linear function according to weighted average temperature point was created. Unemployment data was added to the training data set as an indicator of economic fluctuations. The mean absolute percentage errors of the model were calculated for training, validation, and testing as 3.77 %, 2.02 %, and 1.95 % respectively.