Multistep Forecasting of Power Flow Based on LSTM Autoencoder: A Study Case in Regional Grid Cluster Proposal

A regional grid cluster proposal is required to tackle power grid complexities and evaluate the impact of decentralized renewable energy generation. However, implementing regional grid clusters poses challenges in power flow forecasting owing to the inherent variability of renewable power generation and diverse power load behavior. Accurate forecasting is vital for monitoring the imported power during peak regional load periods and surplus power generation exported from the studied region. This study addressed the challenge of multistep bidirectional power flow forecasting by proposing an LSTM autoencoder model. During the training stage, the proposed model and baseline models were developed using autotune hyperparameters to fine-tune the models and maximize their performance. The model utilized the last 6 h leading up to the current time (24 steps of 15 min intervals) to predict the power flow 1 h ahead (4 steps of 15 min intervals) from the current time. In the model evaluation stage, the proposed model achieved the lowest RMSE and MAE scores with values of 32.243 MW and 24.154 MW, respectively. In addition, it achieved a good R-2 score of 0.93. The evaluation metrics demonstrated that the LSTM autoencoder outperformed the other models for multistep forecasting task in a regional grid cluster proposal.