Time series analysis and forecasting : Application to the Swedish Power Grid

n the electrical power grid, the power load is not constant but continuouslychanging. This depends on many different factors, among which the habits of theconsumers, the yearly seasons and the hour of the day. The continuous change inenergy consumption requires the power grid to be flexible. If the energy provided bygenerators is lower than the demand, this is usually compensated by using renewablepower sources or stored energy until the power generators have adapted to the newdemand. However, if buffers are depleted the output may not meet the demandedpower and could cause power outages. The currently adopted practice in the indus-try is based on configuring the grid depending on some expected power draw. Thisanalysis is usually performed at a high level and provide only some basic load aggre-gate as an output. In this thesis, we aim at investigating techniques that are able topredict the behaviour of loads with fine-grained precision. These techniques couldbe used as predictors to dynamically adapt the grid at run time. We have investigatedthe field of time series forecasting and evaluated and compared different techniquesusing a real data set of the load of the Swedish power grid recorded hourly throughyears. In particular, we have compared the traditional ARIMA models to a neuralnetwork and a long short-term memory (LSTM) model to see which of these tech-niques had the lowest forecasting error in our scenario. Our results show that theLSTM model outperformed the other tested models with an average error of 6,1%