Electricity price forecasting using artificial neural networks

Electricity price forecasting in deregulated open power markets using neural networks is presented. Forecasting electricity price is a challenging task for on-line trading and e-commerce. Bidding competition is one of the main transaction approaches after deregulation. Forecasting the hourly market-clearing prices (MCP) in daily power markets is the most essential task and basis for any decision making in order to maximize the benefits. Artificial neural networks are found to be most suitable tool as they can map the complex interdependencies between electricity price, historical load and other factors. The neural network approach is used to predict the market behaviors based on the historical prices, quantities and other information to forecast the future prices and quantities. The basic idea is to use history and other estimated factors in the future to "fit" and "extrapolate" the prices and quantities. A neural network method to forecast the market-clearing prices (MCPs) for day-ahead energy markets is developed. The structure of the neural network is a three-layer back propagation (BP) network. The price forecasting results using the neural network model shows that the electricity price in the deregulated markets is dependent strongly on the trend in load demand and clearing price. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.