Robust short-term electrical load forecasting framework for commercial buildings using deep recurrent neural networks

This paper presents a robust short-term electrical load forecasting framework that can capture variations in building operation, regardless of building type and location. Nine different hybrids of recurrent neural networks and clustering are explored. The test cases involve five commercial buildings of five different building types, i.e., academic, research laboratory, office, school and grocery store, located at five different locations in Bangkok Thailand, Hyderabad-India, Virginia-USA, New York-USA, and Massachusetts-USA. Load forecasting results indicate that the deep learning algorithms implemented in this paper deliver 20-45% improvement in load forecasting performance as compared to the current state-of-the-art results for both hour-ahead and 24-ahead load forecasting. With respect to sensitivity analysis, it is found that: (i) the use of hybrid deep learning algorithms can take as less as one month of data to deliver satisfactory hour-ahead load prediction, (ii) similar to the clustering technique, 15-min resolution data, if available, delivers 30% improvement in hour-ahead load forecasting, and (iii) the formulated methods are found to be robust against weather forecasting errors. Lastly, the forecasting results across all five buildings validate the robustness of the proposed deep learning framework for the short-term building-level electrical load forecasting tasks.