Short-term forecasting of power flows over major transmission interties: Using Box and Jenkins ARIMA methodology

The deregulation of the Electricity sector in US has led to a tremendous increase in the inter-regional wholesale electricity trade between neighboring utilities or regions. Valuable insights into such imports/exports ahead of time have become crucial market intelligence for the various academicians and market players associated with the industry. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the Box-Jenkins SARIMA (Seasonal Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average) and transfer function methodologies can be successfully employed as the statistical tools for the task of short-term forecasting of the power flows over major transmission interties. The accuracy of this method is illustrated by presenting the example of forecasting the combined power flow over two major transmission interties of the US Pacific Northwest region, namely the Pacific AC intertie and the Pacific DC intertie.