Electric Power Systems Research 74 (2005) 353361

Long-term/mid-term electric load forecasting based on

short-term correlation and annual growth
H.M. Al-Hamadi, S.A. Soliman
Power System Research Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Qatar, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar

Received 3 February 2004; accepted 26 October 2004

Available online 7 April 2005

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach for long-term/mid-term electric power load forecasting. The strong short-term correlations of daily
(24 h) and yearly (52 weeks) load behavior are implemented to predict future load demand. The algorithm is suitable for forecasting weekly
average load profiles for 24 h of a day with a lead-time from several weeks to a few years. It successively incorporates alternating daily and
weekly simple (1st order) linear regression models of previous (1 year) data augmented with annual load growth to predict future load demand.
The results demonstrate successful (one year ahead) load forecast with a mean absolute error of less than 3.8% and with a standard deviation
of less than 4.2, which prove superior to other techniques published earlier in the literature.
2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Electric load forecasting; Long-term/mid-term forecasting; Annual growth; Short-term correlation

1. Introduction and directly or indirectly affect the underlying forecasting

Accurate long-/mid-term electric load forecasting plays
an essential role for electric power system planning. It cor-
responds to load forecasting with lead times long enough to
plan for long-/mid-term maintenance, construction schedul-
ing for developing new generation facilities, purchasing of
generating units, developing transmission and distribution
systems. The accuracy of the long-term load forecast has
significant effect on developing future generation and distri-
bution planning. An extensive overestimation of load demand
will result in substantial investment for the construction of
excess power facilities, while underestimation will result in
customer discontentment. The time horizon for long-/mid-
term forecasting ranges between a few weeks and several
years. Unfortunately, it is difficult to forecast load demand
accurately over a planning period of this length. This fact is
due to the uncertain nature of the forecasting process. There
are a large number of influential factors that characterize
for electric power utility planning and its economical conse-
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: helal@qu.edu.qa (H.M. Al-Hamadi),
solimans@qu.edu.qa (S.A. Soliman).
process; all of them are uncertain and uncontrollable.
Therefore, any log-term forecast, by nature, is inaccurate!
Most of the electric-load forecasting methods are dedi-
cated to short-term (a few minutes to 24 h) forecasting but not
as much for the long-term (110 years) or intermediate-term
(a few days to several months) load forecasting. Generally,
load-forecasting methods can be classified into two broad cat-
egories: parametric methods and artificial intelligence based
methods. The artificial intelligence methods are further clas-
sified into neural networks based methods and fuzzy logic
based methods [1]. The parametric methods are based on re-
lating load demand to its affecting factors by a mathematical
model. The model parameters are estimated using statistical
techniques on historical data of load and its affecting factors.
Parametric load forecasting methods can be generally cat-
egorized under three approaches: regression methods, time
series prediction methods, and grey dynamic methods. This
paper belongs to the parametric regression methods.
The great importance of long-/mid-term load forecasting
quences encouraged development of forecasting approaches
in the electric power research to improve its accuracy. During

0378-7796/$ see front matter 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.epsr.2004.10.015
354 H.M. Al-Hamadi, S.A. Soliman / Electric Power Systems Research 74 (2005) 353361

the last two decades many techniques have been developed

to improve the long-/mid-term forecasting accuracy. Regres-
sion models utilize the strong correlation of load with load-
affecting factors such as weather. A method of mathematical
modeling for global forecasting based on regression analysis
was used to forecast load demand up to year 2000 [2]. Long-
term forecast based on linear and linear-log regression models
of six predetermined sectors has been developed [3]. The time
series models: autoregressive (AR), moving average (MA),
and the autoregressive moving average (ARMA) are popular
and widely accepted by power utilities at present [46]. They
require massive amount of historical data in order to produce
optimal models. Grey system theory is successfully used to
develop dynamic load forecasting models [7].
By nature, Long-term electric load forecasting is a com-
plex problem. Among other factors, its accuracy is extremely
influenced by the weather as well as social behavior of the
community of that load. These factors are difficult to pre-
dict for long-term load forecasting time horizon. Conversely,
short-term forecasting, though affected by weather and daily
social habits, the weather and social habits fluctuation for
the short-term time horizon is small enough to predict load
with high accuracy. Some short-term forecasting algorithms
report to have results with mean absolute error of less than
1% [8]. Consequently, in this paper, short-term correlation of
daily (24 h) and yearly (52 weeks) load demand of a previous
year is utilized to construct a one-year load demand behav-
ior. The load trends obtained thus far are adjusted with the
annual load growth (ALG) to project load demand for next
year. Daily and yearly correlations are modeled as simple lin-
ear regressions on weekly average load (WAL) for the 24 h
and 52 weeks resulting in (24 52) simple linear regression
equations. Daily regression is used to depict the relation be-
tween the loads at each hour with hour prior to it, while the
weekly regression relates the average weekly load with week
prior to it.
The organization of the paper is as follows. In the next
section the load regression models are described. Estimation
of the next year load contour is presented in Section 3. Section
4 describes the method used to estimate and employ the load
annual growth to improve the one-year estimation results.
Section 5 presents load estimation results over 1 year. Finally,
Section 6 is reserved for conclusion.
2. Load regression models
Fig. 1. Two-dimensional layout of the load data.
multiple simple (first order) linear regression models to cap-
ture the global nonlinear behavior of the load. Each of the
linear regression models extracts the short-term correlation
of a certain set of data. Then, a recursive iterative algorithm
is used to tie up the short-term results to capture the global
load prediction.
A one-year data is arranged into two-dimensional layout
with 24 columns representing 24 h of a day and 52 rows rep-
resenting 52 weeks of the year. Fig. 1 illustrates the 2D layout
of the load data.
Special consideration is taken for the load variation dur-
ing the weekends. Accordingly, weekends are treated sepa-
rately in the same manner exactly as the working days. The
L(i,k) cell in Fig. 1 is the average load of the working days
of ith week at kth hour. With this setup of the load data,
obvious great intrinsic correlations exist between successive
columns as well as between successive rows as illustrated
in Figs. 2 and 3, respectively. The two figures, and all sub-
sequent results, are based on the load demand of one of the
largest electric power utility in Canada for the years 1994 and
1995.
Fig. 2 shows the load correlation between hours 01:00 a.m.
and hour 02:00 a.m. throughout the whole year 1994. The
correlation factor was calculated as 0.997. Similarly, Fig. 3
shows the load correlation of weeks 1 and 2 of year 1994,
with a correlation factor of 0.985. The strong correlation is
maintained over the entire year for all 24 h of the day, as
illustrated in Figs. 4 and 5.

The mid-/long-term electric load demand as a function of

time has a complex nonlinear behavior. It depends on a num-
ber of complex factors such as daily and seasonal weather, na-
tional economic growth, and social habits. All of these factors
depend on time in a complex way. Therefore, a single mid-
/long-term electric load demand model that accommodates
most of these factors will have high nonlinear characteristics,
and may not give accurate prediction results. The approach
taken in this paper is the decomposition of the problem into Fig. 2. Comparing weekly average load of 1st and 2nd hour 1994.
 H.M. Al-Hamadi, S.A. Soliman / Electric Power Systems Research 74 (2005) 353361
Fig. 3. Comparing weekly average load of weeks 1 and 2 1994.
Fig. 4. Correlation factor for successive hours 52 weeks of 1994.
The persistent correlation of the prevalent load patterns
suggests the use of short-term simple linear regression mod-
els for successive hours Eq. (1.a) and another set for succes-
sive weeks Eq. (1.b). This results in 24 52 simple linear
regression models, which are used to draw the shape of the
2D load behavior contour for one year.
L(i, k) = a(k)L(i, k 1) + b(k) k = 1, . . . , 24 (1.a)
L(i, k) = c(i)L(i 1, k) + d(i) i = 1, . . . , 52 (1.b)
where a(k) and b(k) are regression parameters at the kth hour,
k = 1,2,. . .,24, which are estimated using the load pairs [L(i,k),
L(i,k 1)] for all i = 1,2,. . .,52, by the least square method;
L(i,k) and L(i,k 1) are the weekly average load at hours k and
k 1, respectively, for all weeks i = 1,. . .,52, with initial con-
dition, L(i,0) = L(i 1,24); c(i) and d(i) are regression param-
eters of the ith week, i = 1,2,. . .,52, which are estimated using
the load pairs [L(i,k), L(i 1,k)] for all k = 1,2,. . ., 24, by the
least square method; L(i,k) and L(i 1,k) are the weekly aver-
age load in ith and (i 1)th weeks, respectively, for all hours
Fig. 5. Correlation factor for successive weeks over 24 h of 1994.
355
Fig. 6. Comparing weekly average loads of various weeks of 94 and 95.
k = 1,. . .,24, with initial condition, L(0,k) = [L(52, k) of the
previous year].
3. Estimation of the next year load contour
The first order regression models developed in the previ-
ous section are used to project the load trends for next year.
Figs. 6 and 7 demonstrate the fact that successive years have
nearly identical load behavior contours. The load contours of
the previous year (1994) coupled with the annual load growth
(described in Section 4) are utilized to predict next year load
(1995). Each of the regression models depicts a local relation
of the load contours of the 2 years. The 24 linear regres-
sion models of Eq. (1.a) relate the load demand of successive
hours of a day. They model the daily behavior of the load.
The seasonal behavior of the load is modeled by the 52 linear
regression models of Eq. (1.b).
A recursive procedure used to estimate next year load con-
tour utilizing regression models of previous year is summa-
rized below:
1. Estimating for the first week the weekly average load: this
corresponds to estimating first row of next year load, refer
to Fig. 8a. Using Eq. (1.b), calculate L(1, k):
L(1, k) = c(k)L(0, k) + d(k) k = 1, 2, . . . , 24 (2)
whereL(1, k) is the estimated weekly average load of the
first week at the kth hour; L(0, k) is set to L(52,k)last year
which is the weekly average load of last years 52nd week;
and [c(k), d(k)] is a pair of regression coefficients of the
kth hour, obtained from Eq. (1.b) using last year data.
Fig. 7. Comparing average weekly load of various hours of 94 and 95.
356 H.M. Al-Hamadi, S.A. Soliman / Electric Power Systems Research 74 (2005) 353361

Fig. 8. (a) Illustrates first week (row) load estimation resulting from first iteration. (b) Illustrates first hour (column) load estimation resulting from 2nd iteration.
(c) Illustrates second week (row) load estimation resulting from 3rd iteration. (d) Illustrates 2nd hour (column) load estimation resulting from 4th iteration.

2. Estimating for the first hour the weekly average load: this 3. Estimating for the second week the weekly average load:
corresponds to estimating first column of next year load, this corresponds to estimating second row of next year
refer to Fig. 8b. Using Eq. (1.a), calculate L(i, 1): load, refer to Fig. 8c. Using Eq. (1.b), calculate L(2, k):

L(i, 1) = a(i)L(i, 0) + b(i) i = 2, 3, . . . , 52 (3) L(2, k) = c(k)L(1, k) + d(k) k = 2, 3, . . . , 24 (4)

where L(i, 1) is the estimated weekly average load of the
first hour in the ith week; L(i, 0) is set to L(i 1, 24) which
is the weekly average load of the 24th hour of the previous
week; and the [a(i), b(i)] is pair of regression coefficients
of the ith week, obtained from Eq. (1.a) using last year
data.
where L(2, k) is the estimated weekly average load of the
second week at the kth hour; and L(1, k) is obtained using
Eq. (2).
4. Estimating for the second hour the weekly average load:
this corresponds to estimating second column of next year

Fig. 9. Approximate curves of load of 3rd hour of 94 and 95. Fig. 10. Annual load growth variation during 52 weeks of a year.
 H.M. Al-Hamadi, S.A. Soliman / Electric Power Systems Research 74 (2005) 353361 357

Table 1
Correlation factors and regression coefficients of seven hours of 1994
1994 Hour 1 Hour 2 Hour 3 Hour 4 Hour 5 Hour 6 Hour 7
k, hour of the day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Correlation factor 0.978 0.997 0.998 0.999 0.999 1.000 0.998
a(k) 0.973 0.994 1.014 1.022 1.025 1.024 1.049
b(k) 89.311 76.835 49.053 31.009 21.580 11.659 6.003

Table 2
Correlation factors and regression coefficients of seven weeks of 1994
1994 i, week number Correlation factor c(i) d(i)
Week 1 1 0.985 0.918 80.911
Week 2 2 0.993 0.964 137.674
Week 3 3 0.987 0.953 123.455
Week 4 4 0.985 0.983 86.209
Week 5 5 0.997 1.025 43.987
Week 6 6 0.994 0.909 5.718
Week 7 7 0.976 1.161 252.143

load, refer to Fig. 8d. Using Eq. (1.a) calculate L(i, 2):
L(i, 2) = a(i)L(i, 1) + b(i) i = 3, 4, . . . , 52
where L(i, 2) is the estimated weekly average load of the
second hour in the ith week; andL(i, 1)is obtained using
Eq. (3).
5. The recursive iterations are repeated until i = k = 24.
The above procedure produces a two-dimensional contour
of the load behavior for 1 year based on regression coeffi-
cients of the previous year. The load contour will then be
augmented by the annual load growth to account for the load
change between successive years.
amounts to an annual load growth at that hour as function
of time (weeks) throughout the whole year. The load growth
(5) is modeled as the difference between the load curves of two
successive years as function of time.
Practical load profiles shows that second order models
will not be sufficient to pick up the annual load growth vari-
ations. Third order models or higher must be used. Models
with orders 36 were tested to best fit load profiles. It was
found that models with orders higher than third order were
very sensitive to round off errors and produce very incor-
rect results. A third order polynomial is utilized to model
the load as function of time at the kth hour as function of
the load of the previous hour. The regression model is as
follows:

4. Annual load growth L(i, k) = 0 (k) + 1 (k)L(i, k 1) + 2 (k)L2 (i, k 1)

To maximize the accuracy of next year load demand esti-
mation, annual load growth is estimated and employed as an
adjusting factor. It is evident that there is a very strong de-
pendence of the load demand on time. Typical load profiles
of successive years prevail very strong correlation at certain
periodic time intervals. For example, refer to Fig. 7; the two
load curves at a certain hour, over the whole year, for two
successive years retain the same shape. Moreover, there is,
on average, a clear load increase over the previous year. It
+3 (k)L3 (i, k 1) (6)
where j (k), j = 0,1,2,3, are regression variables at the kth
hour, k = 1,2,. . .,24, which are determined using the load pairs
[L(i,k), L(i,k 1), for all i = 1,2,. . .,52] by the least square
method. The initial values L(i,0) are set to L(i 1,24). The
two curves that approximate the relationship between L(i,k)
and L(i,k 1) corresponding to the load behavior of the two
years in Fig. 7 are shown in Fig. 9. The annual load growth

Fig. 11. (a) Regression estimation (MAPE) error over 52 weeks of 1995. (b) Overall regression estimation (MAPE) error over 52 weeks of 1995.
358 H.M. Al-Hamadi, S.A. Soliman / Electric Power Systems Research 74 (2005) 353361

Fig. 13. Annual load growth variation during hours of a day.

Fig. 12. Annual load growth throughout 52 weeks of the year.

curve is obtained by subtracting the approximate curve of

1995 (estimated data using regression models) from the ap-
proximate curve of 1994 (actual data) as shown in Fig. 10.
Next, the procedure for evaluating the annual load growth
is given below. Assume that the annual load growth is calcu-
lated between 1994 and 1995.
1. Using Eq. (6), the regression coefficients (24 sets) for 24 h
are determined for the year 1994 actual data. The coeffi-
cients define 24 approximate curves of the weekly average
load, one curve per hour.Repeat the calculations of the pre-
vious step to the 1995 estimated data obtained using the
regression models of Section 3.
3. The annual load growth is defined as the difference of the
approximate load curves of 1995 and 1994 of steps 2 and
1, respectively.
Annual-load-growth (i) = L(i, k)(95) L(i, k)(94)
k = 1, 2, . . . , 24 i = 1, 2, . . . , 52 (7)
For each hour, the annual load growth is added to the
1995 estimated data obtained using the regression models of
Section 3 to produce the final prediction results.

Fig. 14. Comparison of sample of estimated and actual load, 1995 during 24 h.
 H.M. Al-Hamadi, S.A. Soliman / Electric Power Systems Research 74 (2005) 353361 359

5. Examples, results and discussion
To verify the effectiveness of the proposed load demand
forecasting technique we used load data of one of a largest
utility company in Canada for the years 1994 and 1995. Re-
gression models are obtained from 1994 data and used to
project load demand for 1995.
5.1. Multiple regression models results
Using Eq. (1.a), 24 sets of regression coefficients are calcu-
lated. Table 1, shows the first seven of these sets as a sample. It
also lists the correlation factors of successive hours (columns)
of the 1994 load data. Similarly, Using Eq. (1.b), 52 sets of
regression coefficients are calculated. Table 2, shows the first
seven of these sets as a sample, together with the correlation
factors of successive weeks (rows) of the 1994 load data.
5.2. Estimating 1995 load contour
The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) with respect
to the actual load is used to measure the effectiveness of the
estimated results. For n estimated load values, MAPE error

Fig. 15. Comparison of sample of estimated and actual load, 1995 throughout 52 weeks.
360 H.M. Al-Hamadi, S.A. Soliman / Electric Power Systems Research 74 (2005) 353361

is given by the following equation: The recursive procedure outlined in Section 3 is used to
project the shape of 1995-load contour. The regression co-
n
100
|Lest,i Lact,i | efficients determined in Section 5.1, namely [c(i), d(i)] and
MAPE = (8)
n Lact,i [a(k), b(k)] are alternatively used to estimate a row and a col-
i=1
umn, respectively, of 1995 contour described in Fig. 1. The
where Lest,i and Lact,i are the estimated and actual ith load procedure is carried out for 24 iterations converging to the
values, respectively. actual 1995 load. Fig. 11 shows sample of the MAPE error

Table 3
Sample of the estimated weekly average load results1995
Week Hour 1 Hour 8 Hour 16 Hour 20
Actual Est. MAPE Actual Est. MAPE Actual Est. MAPE Actual Est. MAPE
1 998 915 8.55 991 912 8.12 1216 1178 3.91 1370 1326 4.47
2 1078 938 14.43 1128 948 18.41 1283 1173 11.28 1420 1289 13.47
3 871 1042 17.67 888 1092 20.98 1122 1263 14.44 1222 1395 17.84
4 967 1124 16.18 1010 1195 19.00 1229 1331 10.52 1370 1450 8.22
5 1024 1046 2.27 1085 1105 2.09 1220 1214 0.69 1367 1377 0.98
6 1101 1112 1.10 1194 1202 0.83 1283 1303 2.06 1444 1466 2.34
7 1082 1034 4.97 1148 1094 5.47 1200 1183 1.77 1348 1348 0.09
8 999 938 6.24 1052 1009 4.40 1210 1191 1.95 1324 1311 1.34
9 1040 1085 4.64 1101 1149 5.01 1244 1229 1.54 1350 1346 0.46
10 924 950 2.69 973 999 2.72 1161 1186 2.57 1268 1272 0.38
11 951 932 1.91 967 920 4.80 1146 1131 1.52 1206 1200 0.67
12 876 934 5.92 921 970 5.12 1109 1135 2.72 1173 1194 2.19
13 953 899 5.59 993 906 8.97 1131 1063 7.04 1216 1104 11.57
14 997 842 16.01 1015 845 17.52 1171 1048 12.64 1167 1036 13.41
15 878 832 4.66 891 863 2.92 1051 1000 5.24 1029 965 6.57
16 820 809 1.03 839 844 0.47 999 998 0.10 962 981 2.03
17 790 839 5.09 832 869 3.79 959 1014 5.71 930 978 4.96
18 809 803 0.64 843 820 2.33 974 950 2.42 943 977 3.50
19 843 797 4.75 856 798 5.88 1037 996 4.22 1004 969 3.63
20 781 820 4.03 781 831 5.10 995 1039 4.53 968 1012 4.52
21 720 752 3.31 678 730 5.30 904 953 4.98 880 950 7.17
22 743 730 1.33 719 711 0.83 954 952 0.18 929 901 2.90
23 730 731 0.13 704 712 0.81 940 962 2.19 912 910 0.21
24 732 736 0.44 691 705 1.50 963 974 1.11 936 935 0.05
25 726 736 1.00 668 676 0.82 942 958 1.66 902 907 0.47
26 735 762 2.73 655 672 1.69 940 949 1.00 874 898 2.50
27 734 748 1.40 646 682 3.73 944 974 3.01 898 914 1.65
28 751 761 1.05 664 678 1.45 970 970 0.08 911 911 0.04
29 734 768 3.45 657 688 3.22 971 995 2.40 927 942 1.48
30 767 779 1.31 677 702 2.51 994 1013 1.95 929 947 1.86
31 738 768 3.05 647 672 2.61 949 963 1.45 901 929 2.89
32 738 732 0.68 639 650 1.08 948 956 0.88 900 906 0.65
33 754 726 2.93 684 661 2.39 979 957 2.29 923 910 1.30
34 725 719 0.59 667 658 0.94 970 951 1.93 916 906 1.06
35 709 710 0.08 663 660 0.37 942 941 0.10 899 909 1.07
36 684 684 0.00 651 647 0.42 896 924 2.84 870 903 3.40
37 706 706 0.01 705 700 0.48 944 938 0.53 925 926 0.07
38 708 719 1.22 714 717 0.33 954 937 1.76 930 928 0.23
39 730 710 2.03 753 701 5.40 953 949 0.44 954 891 6.43
40 728 749 2.14 727 757 3.09 984 949 3.62 996 977 1.98
41 728 730 0.19 710 740 3.10 940 937 0.29 964 987 2.32
42 756 789 3.43 767 814 4.76 958 994 3.73 1025 1057 3.30
43 753 755 0.16 770 749 2.16 959 979 2.02 998 1048 5.10
44 821 742 8.21 865 771 9.74 1034 978 5.76 1183 1090 9.51
45 843 807 3.73 876 804 7.34 1028 1012 1.69 1183 1144 4.01
46 804 823 2.05 813 854 4.21 1013 984 2.97 1162 1152 0.98
47 881 887 0.57 900 927 2.77 1099 1111 1.22 1231 1244 1.35
48 944 945 0.08 972 974 0.17 1155 1167 1.32 1307 1307 0.02
49 979 950 3.04 1006 955 5.20 1203 1199 0.38 1384 1366 1.82
50 1120 1092 2.82 1133 1112 2.12 1295 1240 5.66 1539 1496 4.45
51 1058 1044 1.48 1023 999 2.44 1221 1199 2.23 1444 1409 3.64
52 962 1042 8.23 849 950 10.39 1106 1201 9.76 1280 1396 11.93
 H.M. Al-Hamadi, S.A. Soliman / Electric Power Systems Research 74 (2005) 353361
convergence for each hour over the 24 iterations. As shown,
the error for each hour converges to its minimum. Fig. 11c
shows the convergence of the overall MAPE error for the
whole year which was found to be 5.12%.
5.3. Annual load growth results
The annual load growth is evaluated and used to augment
the estimated load contours determined in Section 5.2. The
third order polynomial load models described in Eq. (6) are
used to calculate the annual load growth for each hour of the
day. Fig. 9 shows the approximate fitted curves for hour 3 of
1994 and 1995, while Fig. 10 shows the annual load growth
for that hour. The annual load growth curves for all hours
follow almost the same shape with very minimal variations
as illustrated by Figs. 12 and 13. It is noticed that during
almost the first 10 weeks the annual load growth is negative.
This is accounted for the unexpected low load demand during
these weeks in 1995 as noticed in Fig. 7. The low power
consumption in these weeks of 1995 was mainly due to above
normal high temperature. The model naturally responds to
the given data. It will react differently to different data from
different utilities. To reduce the dependency of the annual
load growth on uncontrollable short-term weather variations,
the average of the annual growth over several years can be
calculated.
Fig. 14 shows sample of the estimated weekly average load
curves for some weeks together with MAPE error over 24 h
of the day. Similarly, Fig. 15 presents sample of the weekly
average load for some hours varying over 52 weeks of the
year. Table 3 shows sample of estimated results. Introducing
annual load growth improved the estimation results obtained
in Section 5.2. The resulted overall MAPE is 3.8 with a stan-
dard deviation of 4.14.
6. Conclusion
This paper demonstrated long-/mid-term electric load
forecasting technique for forecasting hourly daily load
361
demand for a lead-time of several weeks to a few years. It
is achieved utilizing short-term correlation of load behavior
together with its annual growth. First, using historic data
over a specific period of time (1 year), the hourly daily load
shape is obtained using multiple simple linear regression
parametric load models. Second, the parametric models
obtained are employed using alternating hourly and weekly
load estimations to determine the shape of the load behavior
for the next year. Last, load annual growth load is added
to correct the shape of next year load. The results indicate
that the mean absolute error of the predicted weekly average
daily load does not exceed 3.8% of the actual load over a
whole year period. With the produced results the proposed
model and forecast technique used provide significant
advantage compared to those typically seen in the literature
for reducing the average absolute error between the fore-
casted and actual loads over a forecast period of one year
ahead.
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