An Attention-Driven Hybrid Deep Network for Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting in Smart Grid

With the large-scale development of smart grids and the integration of renewable energy, the operational complexity and load volatility of power systems have increased significantly, placing higher demands on the accuracy and timeliness of electricity load forecasting. However, existing methods struggle to capture the nonlinear and volatile characteristics of load sequences, often exhibiting insufficient fitting and poor generalization in peak and abrupt change scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a deep learning model named CGA-LoadNet, which integrates a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN), gated recurrent units (GRUs), and a self-attention mechanism. The model is capable of simultaneously extracting local temporal features and long-term dependencies. To validate its effectiveness, we conducted experiments on a publicly available electricity load dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that CGA-LoadNet significantly outperforms baseline models, achieving the best performance on key metrics with an R2 of 0.993, RMSE of 18.44, MAE of 13.94, and MAPE of 1.72, thereby confirming the effectiveness and practical potential of its architectural design. Overall, CGA-LoadNet more accurately fits actual load curves, particularly in complex regions, such as load peaks and abrupt changes, providing an efficient and robust solution for short-term load forecasting in smart grid scenarios.