Net Load Forecasting with Disaggregated Behind-the-Meter PV Generation

Abstract

With increasing adoption of residential PV systems, net load forecasting is gradually shifting from forecasting pure load to forecasting pure load with PV generation. This paper explicitly compares two methods of net load forecasting for systems with high behind-the-meter (BTM) PV penetration. The first method is an additive method, in which PV generation and pure load are forecasted separately and combined to produce a net load forecast. First, a disaggregation algorithm is applied to aggregate net load measurements of residential homes to separate the pure load and PV generation. Then, a long short-term memory (LSTM) model is used to forecast pure load and PV separately using the historical disaggregated pure load and PV, respectively, and weather factors. The results are combined to generate a net load forecast. The additive model is compared to a direct net load forecast from an LSTM model. Results show that over the five-month test horizon, the additive method decreases the root mean square error (RMSE), maximum absolute error, and mean absolute error (MAE) of the net load forecast by 6.13%, 3.63%, and 6.06% respectively, compared to the direct method.