Electricity Demand Forecasting in Future Grid States: A Digital Twin-Based Simulation Study

Short-term forecasting of residential electricity demand is an important task for utilities. Yet, many small and medium-sized utilities still use simple forecasting approaches such as Synthesized Load Profiles, which treat residential households similarly and neither account for renewable energy installations nor novel large consumers (e.g., heat pumps, electric vehicles). The effectiveness of such "one-fits-all" approaches in future grid states--where decentral generation and sector coupling increases--are questionable. Our study challenges these forecasting practices and investigates whether Machine Learning (ML) approaches are suited to predict electricity demand in today's and in future grid states. We use real smart meter data from 3,511 households in Germany over 34 months. We extrapolate this data with future grid states (i.e., increased decentral generation and storage) based on a digital twin of a local energy system. Our results show that Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) approaches outperform SLPs as well as simple benchmark estimators with up to 68.5% lower Root Mean Squared Error for a day-ahead forecast, especially in future grid states. Nevertheless, all prediction approaches perform worse in future grid states. Our findings therefore reinforce the need (a) for utilities and grid operators to employ ML approaches instead of traditional demand prediction methods in future grid states and (b) to prepare current ML methods for future grid states.