ElecLoad: Adaptive Electricity Load Forecasting Guided by Multiple Events

Abstract

Accurate electricity load forecasting provides critical decision support for energy procurement, generation scheduling, and supply-demand balancing, contributing to the economic efficiency and operational reliability of power systems. However, future electricity demand can be affected by the complex interplay of multiple events described in Web notices, weather alerts, and event schedules. Their effects vary over time and can reinforce or offset one another, making electricity load difficult to forecast accurately. While existing methods can incorporate context as additional input, how to use the effects of multiple events and their interactions to guide the load forecasting process itself remains to be explored. To address this gap, we propose ElecLoad, a context-aware agent for multi-event electricity load forecasting that adaptively organizes the forecasting process. Specifically, we train ElecLoad to combine historical load with context to analyze each event's relevance to the target load, the timing of its effects, and potential interactions among events. Guided by this analysis, ElecLoad adaptively chooses to forecast the entire forecast horizon directly or to partition it into segments according to changes in event effects. When the horizon is partitioned, sub-agents independently generate initial forecasts for each segment. The main agent then reviews these forecasts, and the sub-agents perform selective refinement guided by its feedback. Experiments on multiple electricity load datasets show that ElecLoad achieves state-of-the-art performance in most evaluation scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/zhjai/ElecLoad.