Elsevier

Energy and Buildings

Volume 56, January 2013, Pages 23-31
Energy and Buildings

Forecasting of daily natural gas consumption on regional basis in Turkey using various computational methods

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2012.10.023Get rights and content

Abstract

It is widely accepted that natural gas is a clean energy source that can be used to meet energy demand for heating and industrial purpose among the fossil fuels and its usage remarkably increases in order to maintain a clean environment in many countries in the world. It is fact that this makes energy investment planning in a country or region highly important for suitable economic development as well as environmental aspect. Therefore, energy demand for various sectors should be estimated in the frame of short-term energy policy. For accurate estimation of short-term energy demand a limited number of computational methods are employed by using the 4 yearly measured natural gas consumption values. Among these methods, the ANN and time series are widely used for short-term estimation of natural gas consumption in Turkey's certain regions. In this study, multilayer perceptron the ANNs with time series approach is proposed to forecast short-term natural gas consumption. Meteorological data (moisture, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and ambient temperature) obtained from the regional gas distribution company and the local meteorology office in last 4 years to construct well-tuned algorithm. Although the number of data was small, the proposed algorithm works well to forecast the short-term natural gas consumption and produces encouraging and meaningful outcomes for future energy investment policy.

Highlights

► We modeled residential natural gas consumption regional basis various computational methods. ► We used both natural gas consumption and meteorological data including ambient temperature, etc. ► We developed a SARIMAX and two ANN models forecasting daily gas consumption in a city in Turkey. ► Our models can be easily used by province managers and decision makers for future planning.

Introduction

World energy demand has enormously increased since many countries required primary energy sources for sustainable development. For environment concern, natural gas is desired more among other primary energy sources. The primary use of natural gas is not only for heating but also generating electricity in thermal plants. This makes it crucial contribution to a country in term of economic, social and technological developments. This results in determining natural gas demand in order to achieve proper energy management policy for local decision makers in some countries including Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, etc. It is fact that Turkey's fast growing economy is in process to integrate into the European Union's economy and to achieve its economic growth to compete with some of countries in the EU. This simply leads to an increase in Turkey's energy demand but Turkey's natural energy sources are unfortunately insufficient to meet this demand. Therefore, major part of primary energy sources including oil, coal, natural gas, etc., are inevitably imported from Russia, Iran, Algeria and Nigeria.

Turkey has begun to use natural gas for heating since 1987 and yearly natural gas consumption has reached 30.9 × 103 m3 since then. 18.6%, 21.4% and 59.8% of natural gas amount are consumed in industry, residential homes and power plants. It is highly interesting that 45% of Turkey's electricity generation is obtained from natural gas cycle plant and this amount is surprisingly greater than the average world natural gas consumption. Major part of natural gas is consumed by residential places and industrial applications in Turkey's heavily populated cities located in Marmara region. This region accommodates foremost industrial corporations hence 7.3% of Turkey's generated electricity is consumed in this region. Although natural gas consumption is higher in this region, current literature survey indicated that there is still a limited number of study on forecasting natural gas consumption in regional basis. Furthermore, Turkey must consume a certain amount of natural gas according to some agreements signed between Turkey and the related countries. Therefore, it is usually encouraged to create new investments on natural gas consumption. These investments should be carefully planned and managed to minimize economic losses by selecting the appropriate forecasting models.

It is also necessary to precisely predict amount of natural gas consumption to eliminate undesired circumstances including weather conditions, regional development standard, etc. Moreover, accurate natural gas forecasting helps local administration to obtain necessary information on building infrastructure, minimizing air pollution and maintaining clean environment.

The aim of this study is to forecast short-term natural gas consumption in Sakarya province situated in north east Marmara region using the multilayer perceptron ANNs with time series. Sakarya province having important industrial corporations has grown its population by taking many immigrants from every part of the country. Natural gas has been consuming in this province since 2000 hence with new investments on infrastructure the number of customer has increased more than before. It should be emphasized that the major part of natural gas is consumed in residential homes rather than industrial corporations and there is a natural gas plant generating 19 billion kWh of energy in this province. The amount of this energy corresponds to 10% of Turkey's total energy generation from all of the power plants. In order to determine natural gas consumption trend for this province the seasonal time series with additional variables (SARIMAX), multilayer perceptron ANNs and RBF models are employed. The data used for these models cover daily natural gas consumption and as some meteorological data such as humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, ambient temperature and average cloud cover in 4 years (2007–2011). It is believed that this is very helpful for the province administration in short-term energy investment plans. The remainder of this paper is organized as fellows: Literature review about natural gas forecasting is presented in Section 2. Descriptions of the proposed approaches are given in Section 3. In Section 4, the proposed models results are given to forecast the natural gas consumption in Sakarya. The last section is the conclusion of the paper.

Section snippets

Literature review

There are a limited number of studies on short-term-regional natural gas demand forecasting models in regional basis using daily based data. Among these models, statistical and stochastic forecasting methods are employed for short-term energy estimation in few countries. Yumurtaci and Asmaz [1], Akay and Atak [2] proposed an approach based on the gray prediction with rolling mechanism to predict Turkey's total and industrial energy consumption. Ceylan et al. [3] developed an approach to predict

Methodology

In this study, the daily natural gas consumption was modeled by using SARIMAX model, ANN-MLP and ANN-RBF models utilizing some meteorological data. Incomplete meteorological data were completed by local regression techniques and then statistically analyzed to preprocess. Later, the most appropriate time series model was chosen by using statistical methods on stationary data and parameters of SARIMAX model were estimated. Similarly, structure of ANN-MLP and ANN-RBF models were designed according

Results and discussions

In this study, the daily natural gas consumption was estimated by various models based on seasonal multivariate time series, ANN with MLP, ANN with RBF and multivariate OLS. Time series modeling part of the study on stationary series is resulted in using the model SARIMAX (1,1,0)(0,1,1)7. Maximum log-likelihood estimation of non-seasonal (p,q) and seasonal (P,Q) AR and MA coefficients for SARIMAX model are tabulated in Table 3. The statistical results showed that AT and CC were only

Conclusions

The principle purpose of natural gas consumption for residences is heating; hence meteorological factors affect gas demand and also consumption rates basically. Residential natural gas consumption gradually increases as Turkey's economic growth does. Gas consumption rate exhibits a sharp increase due to a rise in the number of natural gas consumers with respect to those in previous years in Turkey. Four-year daily data set seasonal pattern shows that gas consumption increases in winter as it

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