Power System Load

The power system load is said to be the totality of all consumer loads at a given point in
time. The objective of utilizing short-term load forecasting(STLF) methods is to predict the future
system load. However, in order to gain an understanding of power system load, there is a need to
determine what are the factors that influence system load behaviour. Yang(2006) classify these
factors into major categories: weather, time, economy and random disturbance. It is evident that in
areas where there is summer and winter, the load patterns differ greatly. However, in our chosen
setting, there are only two seasons namely: dry (December to May) and rainy (June to November).
Weather factors include precipitation, wind speed, humidity, temperature, light intensity, and more.
Time factors cover properties such as weekday/weekend, holidays, season and time point of the day.
Our study is unique from other STLF researches because of the consideration of the fishing season.
Zamboanga is said to be the Sardine capital of the Philippines, with around 10 major plants within
the peninsula. The fishing ban period is implemented from December to March. This allows the
sardines to spawn and the fishing grounds once again be replenished. It is anticipated that while
there are two major seasons for a Philippine climate such as Zamboanga’s, the dry season can be
further subdivided into open-fishing and fishing ban season. It is expected that the dry season will
yield higher usage for residential and low-voltage accounts, while there shall be a decrease in the
high-voltage (manufacturing plants) accounts. Other rules of load variation as related to time include
weekend or holiday load curves (Ibid). A load forecaster can take advantage of the strong daily,
weekly, seasonal and yearly periodicity.

One of the major categories that influence load behaviour relates to economy. Ying (2006) states
that at times of extreme conditions, the relationship of load profile to price is strong. Price-induced
rationing is a likely scenario in a deregulated market.

Predicting Customer Load Patterns

Electrical customer load pattern prediction deals with the discovery of power load patterns
from load demand data. It attempts to identify existing customer load patterns and employ methods
to determine load profiles (Lee, Lee, Shin, Jin, Jin, & Ryu, 2008). It is an area of great interest for
research with various studies being done across countries to help both energy producers and
distributors, such as ZAMCELCO, avoid costly mistakes. A review of the literature shows that
majority of the research on this area focuses on short-term load forecasting. Researchers such as
Lee et. al. (2008) and Piao, Li and Ryu(2010) state that this may be due to the fact that the results of
mid- to long-term power load prediction contains high forecasting errors.

In a study made by Negnevitsky, Mandal and Srivastava (2009), they determined that some
of the reported models in the area include multiplicative autoregressive models, Box and Jenkins
transfer functions, ARMAX models, optimization techniques as well as dynamic linear or non-linear
models. Accordingly, the more popular models are still those that use linear regression and the
models that decompose the load into weather-dependent and basic components. Heylman, Kim
and Wang(2015) brings this notion further when they forecasted energy trends and peak usage at
the University of Virginia. They concluded that linear models are best for predicting long-term usage
while regression models such as SARIMA is better for short-term predictions.
 o Methods for stlf
o Problems encountered
o Studies/ similarities
o The choice of the ARIMA model
 Data Mining and Its relationship to power load forecasting
o Outline the major tasks of data mining
In the process of knowledge discovery, an iterative sequence is typically followed, to
wit:
 Data cleaning – where inconsistent data and noise are eliminated from the
data set
 Data integration – the process of drawing from multiple data sources and
combining, if needed
 Data transformation – the state where data is consolidated into appropriate
forms to be used for mining
 Data Mining – the process where intelligent methods are applied to extract
data patterns
 Pattern Evaluation – the identification of interesting patterns based on some
measure of interestingness
 Knowledge Representation – presentation of the mined knowledge through
appropriate visualization and knowledge representation techniques
o Focus on definition of clustering and classification
o Discuss the various clustering and classification techniques used in studies on STLF
 Decision Trees and their variations
 Support vector mechanisms
 Neural networks
 K-means classifier