SHORT-RUN FORECASTS OF ELECTRICITY LOADS AND PEAKS

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a short-run for ecasting model of hourly system loads and an evaluation of the forecas t performance. The model was applied to historical data for the Puget Sound Power and Light Company, who did a comparative evaluation of var ious approaches to forecasting hourly loads, for two years in a row. T he results of that evaluation are also presented here. The approach is a multiple regression model, one for each hour of the day (with weeke nds modelled separately), with a dynamic error structure as well as ad aptive adjustments to correct for forecast errors of previous hours. T he results show that it has performed extremely well in tightly contro lled experiments against a wide range of alternative models. Even when the participants were allowed to revise their models after the first year, many of their models were still unable to equal the performance of the authors' models. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.