Electricity Supply Forecasting

Since variable generation and electricity demand both fluctuate, they must be forecast ahead of time to inform real-time electricity scheduling and longer-term system planning. Better short-term forecasts can allow system operators to reduce their reliance on polluting standby plants and to proactively manage increasing amounts of variable sources. Better long-term forecasts can help system operators (and investors) determine where and when power plants should be built. While many system operators today use basic forecasting techniques, forecasts will need to become increasingly accurate, span multiple horizons in time and space, and better quantify uncertainty to support these use cases. Machine learning has commonly been used on all these fronts.

Background Readings

Solar power forecasting

• "A review and evaluation of the state-of-the-art in PV solar power forecasting: Techniques and optimization" (2020): A review of work in solar power forecasting.
• "Forecasting of photovoltaic power generation and model optimization: A review" (2018): A review of work in solar power forecasting.

Wind power forecasting

• "Current methods and advances in forecasting of wind power generation" (2012): A review of work in wind power forecasting.
• "A review on the forecasting of wind speed and generated power" (2009): A review of work in wind speed and wind power forecasting.

Electricity demand forecasting

• "Electrical load forecasting models: A critical systematic review" (2017): A review and taxonomy of electricity load forecasting models.
• "Probabilistic electric load forecasting: A tutorial review" (2016): A tutorial and review of methods of probabilistic electricity load forecasting.

Community

Journals

• International Journal of Forecasting: The official journal of the International Institute of Forecasters. Journal website here.

Organizations

• OpenClimateFix: A "non-profit research and development lab" working on projects including solar PV forecasting and PV panel mapping. Website here.

Libraries and Tools

• See this list by Jack Kelly of Open Climate Fix for useful tools for processing and visualizing data during solar PV nowcasting workflows.

Data

General

• See the Electricity Systems page for general electricity systems datasets.

Solar power forecasting

• See this list by Jack Kelly of Open Climate Fix for useful data sources for solar PV nowcasting.
• SubseasonalRodeo: "A benchmark dataset for training and evaluating subseasonal forecasting systems—systems predicting temperature or precipitation 2-6 weeks in advance—in the western contiguous United States." Available here.
• American Meteorological Society 2013-2014 Solar Energy Prediction Contest: Contest data for producing daily forecasts of solar energy, available here.

Future Directions

• Hybrid physical modeling: As weather fundamentally drives solar and wind power production, and important direction could be for solar and wind power forecasts to draw on innovations in climate modeling, weather forecasting, and hybrid physical modeling techniques. These techniques might be able to improve short- to medium-term forecasts (e.g., by modeling fine-grained wind turbulence) and enable ML-based forecasts to deal with issues of weather distribution shift for longer-term (e.g. year-scale) forecasts.
• Decision-integration: As supply and demand forecasts ultimately need to inform power system optimization decisions, a fruitful direction may be to integrate knowledge of how these decisions are made into ML models. For instance, deep neural networks have been used to forecast electricity demand in a way that optimizes for electricity scheduling costs rather than forecast accuracy, and this notion could be extended to optimizing for greenhouse gas emissions.
• Interpretable/explainable ML and uncertainty quantification: Techniques that explain or quantify the uncertainty of forecasts could help power system operators better integrate these forecasts into their operations, and facilitate applications such as robust optimization.