Using conditional Invertible Neural Networks to perform mid-term peak load forecasting

Measures for balancing the electrical grid, such as peak shaving, require accurate peak forecasts for lower aggregation levels of electrical loads. Thus, the Big Data Energy Analytics Laboratory (BigDEAL) challenge—organised by the BigDEAL—focused on forecasting three different daily peak characteristics in low aggregated load time series. In particular, participants of the challenge were asked to provide long-term forecasts with horizons of up to 1 year in the qualification. The authors present the approach of the KIT-IAI team from the Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The approach to the challenge is based on a hybrid generative model. In particular, the authors use a conditional Invertible Neural Network (cINN). The cINN gets the forecast of a sliding mean as representative of the trend, different weather features, and calendar information as conditioning input. By this, the proposed hybrid method achieved second place overall and won two out of three tracks of the BigDEAL challenge.