  Short-Term Load Forecasting (STLF) is a fundamental component in the
efficient management of power systems, which has been studied intensively over
the past 50 years. The emerging development of smart grid technologies is
posing new challenges as well as opportunities to STLF. Load data, collected at
higher geographical granularity and frequency through thousands of smart
meters, allows us to build a more accurate local load forecasting model, which
is essential for local optimization of power load through demand side
management. With this paper, we show how several existing approaches for STLF
are not applicable on local load forecasting, either because of long training
time, unstable optimization process, or sensitivity to hyper-parameters.
Accordingly, we select five models suitable for local STFL, which can be
trained on different time-series with limited intervention from the user. The
experiment, which consists of 40 time-series collected at different locations
and aggregation levels, revealed that yearly pattern and temperature
information are only useful for high aggregation level STLF. On local STLF
task, the modified version of double seasonal Holt-Winter proposed in this
paper performs relatively well with only 3 months of training data, compared to
more complex methods.
