Demand Forecasting

Forecasting is increasing in importance in the smart meter and smart grid era due to the growing complexity of challenges to the industry and abundance of new data. For the energy and utilities industry, better forecasting enables long-term integrated resource planning and improved capital expense budgeting. With SAS, you can:

• Analyze and forecast trends, now and over time. Whether you want to understand past trends, forecast the future or better understand how your business functions, we provide a wide range of analytical tools that ensure your success.
• Identify which indicators influence the forecast and quantify the impact. With multiple views of trends and correlations, historically high or low demand can be identified, highlighting possible causes to make better decisions about power availability and better understand the effects of climate, economic factors and previously unknown determinants.
• Know when customers change behavior. Gain clarity into consumer response to economic conditions, climate change, demand response programs or government initiatives by forecasting energy demand at any level of geographic or asset hierarchy, including meter level.
• Manage volumes of energy usage data inputs from smart meters. Harness new data streams to improve minute-by-minute responses to changing use conditions. Convert transactional meter and operational systems into a forecast-ready format.
• Quickly build forecast models for smaller time increments. Understand demographics and user profiles, with usage information coming in 15- or 30-minute intervals.
• Develop predictive modeling capabilities. Take the knowledge from forecasts and predict the impacts that changes to the independent variables will have on demand, load and revenue for better planning, risk mitigation and improved response to governmental regulations and inquiries.

• Superior data integration capabilities. This enables companies to extract and transform data from nearly any source, identify analytically relevant variables and describe underlying patterns and characteristics of a data set. 
• A proven track record in helping industries adapt to change. SAS has many years of experience working with a wide range of markets that have faced new forecasting challenges. SAS can support generation, transmission and distribution resource planning, capital and O&M budgeting, revenue forecasting, retail marketing, call center staffing, customer management and risk assessment. 
• A proven solution. SAS solutions can generate large quantities of high-quality forecasts quickly and automatically, enabling organizations to plan more effectively for the future. Analysts can generate forecasts that reflect the realities of business, improving your ability to plan future events with confidence, and improve forecasting performance across all products and locations – at any level of aggregation.