**4. Demand forecast**

Demand or load forecasting is very essential for reliable power system operations and market system operations. It determines the amount of system load against which real-time dispatch and day-ahead scheduling functions need to balance in different time horizon. Demand forecasting typically provides forecasts for three different time frames:


Demand forecasting play an increasingly important role in the restructured electricity market and smart grid environment due to its impacts on market prices and market participants' bidding behavior. In general, demand forecasting is a challenging subject in view of complicated features of load and effective data gathering. With Demand Response being one of the few near-term options for large-scale reduction of greenhouse gases, and fits strategically with the drive toward clean energy technology such as wind and solar, advanced demand forecasting should effectively take the demand response features/characteristics and the uncertainty of interimttent renewable generation into account.

Many load forecasting techniques including extrapolations, autoregressive model, similar day methods, fuzzy logic, Kalman filters and artificial neural networks. The rest of section will focus on the discussion of STLF which is a key input to near real-time generation dispatch in market and system operations.
