Short-term residential load forecasting: Impact of calendar effects and forecast granularity

The use of historical load profiles with daily and weekly seasonality, combined with weather data, leaves the explicit calendar effects a very low predictive power. In the setting studied here, it was shown that forecast errors can be reduced by using a coarser forecast granularity. It was also found that one year of historical data is sufficient to develop a load forecast model for residential customers as a further increase in training dataset has a marginal benefit.