Forecasting the electricity load from one day to one week ahead for the Spanish system operator

This paper discusses the building process and models used by Red Eléctrica de España (REE), the Spanish system operator, in short-term electricity load forecasting. REE's forecasting system consists of one daily model and 24 hourly models with a common structure. There are two types of forecasts of special interest to REE, several days ahead predictions for daily data, and one day ahead hourly forecasts. Accordingly, the forecast accuracy is assessed in terms of their errors. To do this, we analyse historical, real time forecasting errors for daily and hourly data for the year 2006, and report the forecasting performance by day of the week, time of the year and type of day. Other aspects of the prediction problem, like the influence of the errors in predicting the temperature on forecasting the load several days ahead, or the need for an adequate treatment of special days, are also investigated.