Abstract

An efficient energy management system is integrated with the power grid to collect information about the energy consumption and provide the appropriate control to optimize the supply-demand pattern. Therefore, there is a need for intelligent decisions for the generation and distribution of energy, which is only possible by making the correct future predictions. In the energy market, future knowledge of the energy consumption pattern helps the end-user to decide when to buy or sell the energy to reduce the energy cost and decrease the peak consumption. The Internet of things (IoT) and energy data analytic techniques have provided the convenience to collect the data from the end devices on a large scale and to manipulate all the recorded data. Forecasting an electric load is fairly challenging due to the high uncertainty and dynamic nature involved due to spatiotemporal pattern consumption. Existing conventional forecasting models lack the ability to deal with the spatio-temporally varying data. To overcome the above-mentioned challenges, this work proposes an encoder-decoder model based on convolutional long short-term memory networks (ConvLSTM) for energy load forecasting. The proposed architecture uses encode consisting of multiple ConvLSTM layers to extract the salient features in the data and to learn the sequential dependency and then passes the output to the decoder, having LSTM layers to make forecasting. The forecasting results produced by the proposed approach are favorably comparable to the existing state-of-the-art and better than the conventional methods with the least error rate. Quantitative analyses show that a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 6.966% for household energy consumption and 16.81% for city-wide energy consumption is obtained for the proposed forecasting model in comparison with existing encoder-decoder-based deep learning models for two real-world datasets.