Inclusion of temporal effects in forecasting building electrical loads for demand resource planning

This paper presents a method of load forecasting specifically for predicting a building´s electrical load for demand resource planning. This forecasting method allows the manager of a controllable load to assess his or her risk and capabilities when participating in the energy market. Correlation studies are performed using demand data collected for the main library building at Drexel University in order to identify important factors that drive the electrical demand of the building as well as importance of temporal load dependencies. Incorporating these temporal dependencies is the primary focus of this work. A general problem formulation for building-specific load forecasting based on previous research is first presented. The remainder of the paper focuses on a simple engineering method of including temporal effects into the forecaster. The forecasting method presented here is tested using the data collected at Drexel University and the results compared to the case when temporal load dependencies are ignored, demonstrating its ability as a demand resource planning tool.