Short-term industrial load forecasting: A case study in an Italian factory

Excellence in the planning and operations of power systems largely relies on accurate forecasts of loads. Although load forecasting has been extensively studied over the past several decades, the scientific community has not yet paid much attention to industrial load forecasting. The electricity demand of factories depends on many factors, of which some are uncommon or not as important in the classical load forecasting models. For instance, the scheduled processes and work shifts are very important to forecasting short-term industrial loads. In this paper, we offer some insights into modeling industrial loads. We develop a set of multiple linear regression models for an Italian factory that manufactures transformers. The proposed models outperform two other benchmark models for forecasting industrial loads 24 hours in advance.