Electric power forecasting plays a substantial role in the administration and balance of current power systems. For this reason, accurate predictions of service demands are needed to develop better programming for the generation and distribution of power and to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities in the integration of an electric power system. For the purposes of the current study, a systematic literature review was applied to identify the type of model that has the highest propensity to show precision in the context of electric power forecasting. The state-of-the-art model in accurate electric power forecasting was determined from the results reported in 257 accuracy tests from five geographic regions. Two classes of forecasting models were compared: classical statistical or mathematical (MSC) and machine learning (ML) models. Furthermore, the use of hybrid models that have made significant contributions to electric power forecasting is identified, and a case of study is applied to demonstrate its good performance when compared with traditional models. Among our main findings, we conclude that forecasting errors are minimized by reducing the time horizon, that ML models that consider various sources of exogenous variability tend to have better forecast accuracy, and finally, that the accuracy of the forecasting models has significantly increased over the last five years.
Keywords: electric power; forecasting accuracy; machine learning.