Cooperative co-evolutionary approach to electricity load and price forecasting in deregulated electricity markets

Many electric power systems around the world have introduced deregulated markets where suppliers of electricity can freely compete. Deregulation of the electric power industry worldwide raises many challenging issues. Under this environment there will be new tasks to be solved. In the traditional and also new structure of the power industry, accurate short and long term load forecasting have been crucial to the efficient and economic operation of the system. However in the environment of a deregulated power market, various decisions require accurate knowledge of future spot prices for electricity. To buy or sell physical electricity, to offer a transaction to the market, or to analyze security of the network are examples of transactions that can rationally be made only with an idea of future electricity prices. Therefore, forecasting of the market clearing price (MCP) is becoming increasingly relevant to different market players and system operator. This paper introduces a new forecasting method that forecasts the next-day electricity price and the electricity load based on cooperative co-evolutionary (Co-Co) approach. The proposed method is applied to predict the MCP and the load in a real power market. The results of the new method show significant improvement in the load and price forecasting process