This study develops a methodology to characterise and forecast large consumers’ electricity demand, particularly municipalities, with hundreds of different metered supply points based on the previous characterisation of facilities’ consumption. Demand forecasting allows consumers to improve their participation in electricity markets and manage their electricity consumption. The method considers a classification by different types of metered supply points combined with artificial neural networks to obtain hourly forecasts using well-known parameters such as day types, hourly temperature, the last hour of electricity consumption, and sunrise and sunset time. We apply the methodology to the municipality of Valencia using over five hundred hourly load profiles for a year during 2017 and 2018. Our results present aggregated forecasts with a maximum Mean Absolute Percentage Error of 3.8% per day, outperforming the same forecast without classifying Metered Supply Points. We conclude that a correct electricity demand forecast for a consumer with different types of consumption does not need submetering, but characterising Metered Supply Points is an option with lower costs that allows for better predictions.

The authors regret <To not have included during the publication process the acknowledgement to a project that has been part of this work and want to include in the acknowledgements part: This work was partially supported by the Grant TED2021-129722B-C31 (ALIVE-DER), funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR”. >. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.