Load forecasting for electric utilities

Thesis/Dissertation · Tue Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 1985

OSTI ID:5577433

Huss, W R

This research is designed to answer three principal questions: (1) What has been the historical accuracy of electric utility forecasts. (2) How important is historical accuracy in selecting or evaluating an electric utility forecast. and (3) How well do advanced time series techniques perform versus the utility models. The results showed that ''Does the forecast make sense.'', data availability, and historical performance of the model were the most important selection/evaluation criteria for all three client groups, namely utility analysts, utility senior managers, and regulators. Analysis of historical accuracy of utility forecasting was performed by forecast horizon, forecast vintage, time devoted to forecasting, sector, technique, and type to forecast (energy or peak). It was found that end-use models have performed particularly well in the residential sector, while customer surveys have worked well for short term forecasts in the industrial sector. The performance of five time-series techniques was compared using historical utility sales data. The combination technique proved to be the best overall technique across all measurement methods, forecast vintages, and horizons. The Univariate Adaptive Estimation procedure also performed well in all situations. Actual utility forecasts did extremely well versus the time-series methods for the two-year horizon, but their performance deteriorated with longer horizons.

• Research Organization: Ohio State Univ., Columbus (USA)
• OSTI ID: 5577433
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY
292000 -- Energy Planning & Policy-- Supply
Demand & Forecasting
296000* -- Energy Planning & Policy-- Electric Power
ACCURACY
DATA ANALYSIS
ELECTRIC UTILITIES
FORECASTING
LOAD MANAGEMENT
MANAGEMENT
MATHEMATICS
PUBLIC UTILITIES
TIME-SERIES ANALYSIS