Copyright © 2013 Yi Yang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Electricity is a special energy which is hard to store, so the electricity demand forecasting remains an important problem. Accurate short-term load forecasting (STLF) plays a vital role in power systems because it is the essential part of power system planning and operation, and it is also fundamental in many applications. Considering that an individual forecasting model usually cannot work very well for STLF, a hybrid model based on the seasonal ARIMA model and BP neural network is presented in this paper to improve the forecasting accuracy. Firstly the seasonal ARIMA model is adopted to forecast the electric load demand day ahead; then, by using the residual load demand series obtained in this forecasting process as the original series, the follow-up residual series is forecasted by BP neural network; finally, by summing up the forecasted residual series and the forecasted load demand series got by seasonal ARIMA model, the final load demand forecasting series is obtained. Case studies show that the new strategy is quite useful to improve the accuracy of STLF.