Short-Term Load Forecasting of Sustainable Power Systems Based on Newton–Raphson-Based Optimizer–Extreme Gradient Boosting under Extreme Weather Events

Abstract

With continuous advancements in load-side resources such as distributed photovoltaic systems, electric vehicles, and virtual power plants, the low-carbon and sustainable development attributes of power systems have been significantly enhanced. Meanwhile, the coupling intensity between sustainable power systems and meteorological conditions has been further consolidated. Considerable impacts are exerted by weather variations, particularly extreme weather events, on the dispatching and operation of sustainable power systems. Accurate load forecasting is critical for enabling sustainable power systems operators to optimize power generation strategy, ensuring supply stability and resilience against extreme weather-induced disruptions. However, the intrinsic non-stationarity and volatility of extreme weather events present significant challenges to conventional forecasting approaches. Herein, we introduce a hybrid algorithm integrating Newton–Raphson-based optimizer (NRBO) with extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) to enhance short-term load predictions under such conditions. The model uses optimally selected meteorological and load features as inputs, while NRBO systematically tunes XGBoost’s hyper-parameters to maximize performance. Evaluated on an Irish dataset, the proposed framework is quantitatively compared against five baseline models, including traditional decision trees and neural networks. The case studies show that the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of the proposed model is 2.57%, which is the lowest among these decision tree and neural network algorithms.