Extreme Electricity Forecasting In The Arctic Polar Circle

AleaSoft is celebrating 10 years of collaboration with the Norwegian electricity system operator Statnett. Statnett uses both short- and mid-term electricity demand forecasting based on AleaSoft’s Alea Model scientific model.

Over the past ten years, this partnership has allowed both to make forecasts of national electricity demand in Norway in the short and medium term. Statnett, which is subject to the Norwegian Public Procurement Act, organized a public tender for the contracting of services. This was attended by companies from all over the world and the contract was awarded to AleaSoft due to the quality of its forecasts.

The northern region of Norway is located over the 66th parallel within the Arctic Circle. Due to this, this area has extreme temperatures and extreme conditions of luminosity, along with difficulty making electricity consumption forecasts.

Due to this difficulty, AleaSoft developed an application for Statnett that automatically generates forecasts every five minutes. The app takes into account all of the new available information on demand and meteorological data. The obtained forecasts have a granularity of 15 minutes and a horizon of 72 hours in the short term. In the medium term, it has 13 months.

The process for the data input and forecast output uses a web service system to communicate with the Statnett applications and processes. AleaModel is the forecasting methodology that was developed and is used by the forecasts. AleaSoft developed this model specifically for the energy sector. It is described as a hybrid and scientifically-based methodology that combines classical statistical techniques with SARIMAX models of the Box-Jenkins method. The model also uses advanced AI techniques such as the Recurrent Neural Networks and Machine Learning algorithms.