Probabilistic Forecasting of Cogenerated District Heating in Finland Under Structural Fleet Transition: A Temporal Fusion Transformer Approach
District heating systems in Finland are undergoing structural transition as combined heat and power (CHP) plants are decommissioned, creating non-stationary forecasting conditions that challenge conventional models. This paper presents a probabilistic forecasting pipeline for national Finnish CHP-based district heating using a Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) trained on nine years of hourly Fingrid open data. A residual-from-persistence target reformulation is introduced to handle non-stationarity under structural regime shift, significantly improving forecast accuracy. The proposed TFT-resid model achieves a mean absolute error of 87.4 MWh/h and a sMAPE of 21.2%, outperforming XGBoost baselines and naive persistence benchmarks. This work forms the research foundation of the ET-Design Lab (Aurinkolab Community), where the forecasting methodology is applied in the construction of an AI-driven Uusimaa Heating Digital Twin — a real student-built tool at the intersection of cutting-edge energy research and hands-on engineering education for teenagers.
Authors
- Maria Rohnonen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6336-6735)
Institutions
- Arcada University of Applied Sciences (FI)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2026-05-11
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20118487
- Primary Topic
- Integrated Energy Systems Optimization
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00