A data-driven approach for electricity load profile prediction of new supermarkets

Predicting the electricity demand of new supermarkets will help with design, planning, and future energy management. Instead of creating complex site-specific thermal engineering models, simplified statistical energy prediction models as we propose can be useful to energy managers. We have designed and implemented a data-driven method to predict the ‘electricity daily load profile’ (EDLP) for new stores. Our preliminary work exploits a data-set of hourly electricity meter readings for 196 UK supermarkets from 2012 to 2015. Our method combines the most similar stores on a feature space (floor area split by usage such as general merchandise, food retail and offices and geographical location) to obtain a prediction of the EDLP of a new store. Computational experiments were performed separately for subsets of supermarkets that consume only electricity, both electricity and gas, and by season. The best results were obtained when predicting Summer EDLPs with stores using electricity only. In this case, the average Manhattan difference and the percentage difference are 234 kWh and 16%, respectively. We aim to develop an application tool for supermarket energy managers to automatically generate EDLP for potential new stores.