A hybrid economic indices based short-term load forecasting system

The bankruptcy event of Lehman Brothers and the corresponding global economic recession in 2008 and 2009, influenced the electricity load demand patterns for which traditional load forecasting approaches were not able to effectively predict. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a new hybrid economic indices based short-term load forecasting (HEI-STLF) system. In which business indicators, such as the leading index or the coincide index, each combined with stock index as hybrid economic indices influencing factors for the support vector regression (SVR) model, to respond to the economic dynamics and reduce its impact on forecasting accuracy. The Taiwan island-wide electricity load demands from 2008 to 2011 are used as the case study for performance testing with different combinations of the Taiwan business indicator and the Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalization-Weighted Stock Index (TAIEX). The results show that the proposed HEI-STLF system with hybrid economic indices of an annualized six-month rate of change of composite leading index and a 90 days moving average of TAIEX, achieves the best forecasting performance. Compared to the traditional SVR load forecasting approach, it improves the forecasting accuracy in the best condition by 30.39% in the period when the load demands are affected by the global economic recession.