  Electricity load forecasting for buildings and campuses is becoming
increasingly important as the penetration of distributed energy resources
(DERs) grows. Efficient operation and dispatch of DERs require reasonably
accurate predictions of future energy consumption in order to conduct
near-real-time optimized dispatch of on-site generation and storage assets.
Electric utilities have traditionally performed load forecasting for load
pockets spanning large geographic areas, and therefore forecasting has not been
a common practice by buildings and campus operators. Given the growing trends
of research and prototyping in the grid-interactive efficient buildings domain,
characteristics beyond simple algorithm forecast accuracy are important in
determining true utility of the algorithm for smart buildings. Other
characteristics include the overall design of the deployed architecture and the
operational efficiency of the forecasting system. In this work, we present a
deep-learning-based load forecasting system that predicts the building load at
1-hour intervals for 18 hours in the future. We also discuss challenges
associated with the real-time deployment of such systems as well as the
research opportunities presented by a fully functional forecasting system that
has been developed within the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Intelligent
Campus program.
