Load Forecasting for Control of the Use of Transmission System for Electric Distribution Utilities

The Brazilian electric sector reform established that the remuneration of distribution utilities must be through the management of their systems. This fact increased the necessity of control and management of load flows through the connection points between the distribution systems and the basic grid as a function of the contracted amounts. The objective of this control is to avoid that these flows exceed some thresholds along the contracted values, avoiding monetary penalties to the utility or unnecessary amounts of contracted flows that overrates the costumers. This question highlights the necessity of forecast the flows in these connection points in sufficient time to permit the operator to take decisions to avoid flows beyond the contracted ones. In this context, this work presents the development of a neural network based load flow forecaster, being tested two time-series neural models： support vector machines and Bayesian inference applied to multilayered perceptron. The models are applied to real data from a Brazilian distribution utility.