Machine Learning-Based Electricity Load Forecast for the Agriculture Sector

A large section of the population has a source of income from the agriculture sector, but their share in the Indian GDP is low. Thus, there is a need to forecast energy to improve and increase productivity. The main sources of energy in agriculture are electricity, coal, and diesel. Among them, electricity plays an important role in land irrigation. Power forecasting is also essential for demand response management. Thus, any process that dissolves future consumption is favorable. This article presents a time series-based technique for forecasting medium-term load in agriculture. The aim is to find the peak periods of power consumption by months and seasons using statistical and machine learning-based techniques. The result shows that SARIMA has lower RMSE and exponential smoothing has lower RMSPE error than random forest and LSTM, which makes the statistical approach more efficient than intelligent approach for historical datasets. The season-wise peak demand occurs during the Rabi season. Finally, five-year ahead load in the agriculture sector was determined using the best models.