Average Midterm Electrical Load Forecasting for Duhok City Based on Artificial Neural Network

The demand of the city of Duhok for electricity is increasing and this requires efforts to provide the required load. Building new electricity generation units and/or importing electricity from neighboring countries are available to fulfill these needs. Therefore, it is vital to have earlier information about electrical demand. Midterm electrical load forecasting is useful to estimate the required power to be extracted from power systems in a time span of one year. In addition, it provides information that is necessary for planning the maintenance, expansion, and improving system performance of electrical power generation. These have an impact on reducing the operational costs and the emission of power plants through reducing the fuel consumption. Therefore, this paper proposes a medium-term load forecasting based Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and applies it on Duhok city power system. Available data for the power system of the city is used in the ANN to predict the load demand up to the year 2025. Using ANN in forecasting has importance because of its simplicity, easy implementation, yet effective and superior performance.