Onlineforecasting

Peder Bacher et. al.
This paper presents an in-depth description of the onlineforecast methodology.

Short-term heat load forecasting for single family houses
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Peder Bacher, Henrik Madsen, Henrik Aalborg Nielsen, Bengt Perers
This paper presents a method for forecasting the load for space heating in a single-family house. The forecasting model is built using data from sixteen houses located in Sønderborg, Denmark, combined with local climate measurements and weather forecasts. Every hour the hourly heat load for each house the following two days is forecasted. The forecast models are adaptive linear time-series models and the climate inputs used are: ambient temperature, global radiation and wind speed. A computationally efficient recursive least squares scheme is used. The models are optimized to fit the individual characteristics for each house, such as the level of adaptivity and the thermal dynamical response of the building, which is modeled with simple transfer functions. Identification of a model, which is suitable for all the houses, is carried out. The results show that the one-step ahead errors are close to white noise and that practically all correlation to the climate variables are removed. Furthermore, the results show that the forecasting errors mainly are related to: unpredictable high frequency variations in the heat load signal (predominant only for some houses), shifts in resident behavior patterns and uncertainty of the weather forecasts for longer horizons, especially for solar radiation.

Online short-term solar power forecasting
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Peder Bacher, Henrik Madsen, Henrik Aalborg Nielsen
This paper describes a new approach to online forecasting of power production from PV systems. The method is suited to online forecasting in many applications and in this paper it is used to predict hourly values of solar power for horizons of up to 36 hours. The data used is fifteen-minute observations of solar power from 21 PV systems located on rooftops in a small village in Denmark. The suggested method is a two-stage method where first a statistical normalization of the solar power is obtained using a clear sky model. The clear sky model is found using statistical smoothing techniques. Then forecasts of the normalized solar power are calculated using adaptive linear time series models. Both autoregressive (AR) and AR with exogenous input (ARX) models are evaluated, where the latter takes numerical weather predictions (NWPs) as input. The results indicate that for forecasts up to two hours ahead the most important input is the available observations of solar power, while for longer horizons NWPs are the most important input. A root mean square error improvement of around 35 % is achieved by the ARX model compared to a proposed reference model.

Load forecasting of supermarket refrigeration
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Lisa Buth Rasmussen, Peder Bacher, Henrik Madsen, Henrik Aalborg Nielsen, Christian Heerup, Torben Green
This paper presents a novel study of models for forecasting the electrical load for supermarket refrigeration. The data used for building the models consists of load measurements, local climate measurements and weather forecasts. The load measurements are from a supermarket located in a village in Denmark. Every hour the hourly electrical load for refrigeration is forecasted for the following 42 h. The forecast models are adaptive linear time series models. The model has two regimes; one for opening hours and one for closing hours, this is modeled by a regime switching model and two different methods for predicting the regimes are tested. The dynamic relation between the weather and the load is modeled by simple transfer functions and the non-linearities are described using spline functions. The results are thoroughly evaluated and it is shown that the spline functions are suitable for handling the non-linear relations and that after applying an auto-regressive noise model the one-step ahead residuals do not contain further significant information.