Monthly electric energy demand forecasting based on trend extraction

Medium-term electric energy demand forecasting is an essential tool for power system planning and operation, mainly in those countries whose power systems operate in a deregulated environment. This paper proposes a novel approach to monthly electric energy demand time series forecasting, in which it is split into two new series: the trend and the fluctuation around it. Then two neural networks are trained to forecast them separately. These predictions are added up to obtain an overall forecasting. Several methods have been tested to find out which of them provides the best performance in the trend extraction. The proposed technique has been applied to the Spanish peninsular monthly electric consumption. The results obtained are better than those reached when only one neural network was used to forecast the original consumption series and also than those obtained with the ARIMA method.