A pattern recognition approach for peak prediction of electrical consumption

Demand peaks in electrical power consumptions pose serious challenges for energy companies as these are typically unforeseen and require the net to support abnormally high consumption levels. Such peaks can be regulated in smart energy grids with the introduction of relatively simple techniques such as load balancing and smart pricing strategies. This is, however, difficult in practice because it requires prediction of peaks prior to their actual occurrence.

While most studies formulate the problem as an estimation problem, we take a radically different approach and formulate it as a classical pattern recognition problem. Further, the paper applies classification methods to solve the problem and applies these with real-life data from a Norwegian smart grid pilot project. Some of the key findings are that the algorithms can accurately detect 80% of energy consumption peaks up to one week ahead of time. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Learning Automata based approaches for selecting the optimal prediction model from a pool of models in an online fashion.