Short-term load forecasting in a non-residential building contrasting models and attributes

The electric grid is evolving. Smart grids and demand response systems will increase the performance of the grid in terms of cost efficiency, resilience and safety. Accurate load forecasting is an important issue in the daily operation and control of a power system. A suitable short term load forecasting will enable a utility provider to plan the resources and also to take control measures to balance the supply and demand of electricity. The aim of this paper is to create a method to forecast the electric load in a non-residential building. Another goal is to analyse what kind of data, as weather, indoor ambient, calendar and building occupancy, is the most relevant in building load forecasting. A simple method, tested with three different models, such as MLR, MLP and SVR, is proposed. The results, from a real case study in the University of Girona, show that the proposed forecast method has high accuracy and low computational costThis research has been partially supported by the Spanish Government project MESC (Ref. DPI2013-47450-C2-1-R). Also we would like to thank the Department of Physics and acknowledge the technical assistance and maintenance service of the UdG (SOTIM) which provided the weather and consumption data respectively. The authors belong to the ‘Smart IT Engineering and Solutions’ accredited research group (Generalitat de Catalunya, 2014 SGR 1052