Artificial neural networks applied to the prediction of spot prices in the market of electric energy

The commercialization of electricity in Brazil as well as in the world has undergone several changes over the past 20 years. In order to achieve an economic balance between supply and demand of the good called electricity, stakeholders in this market follow both rules set by society (government, companies and consumers) and set by the laws of nature (hydrology). To deal with such complex issues, various studies have been conducted in the area of computational heuristics. This work aims to develop a software to forecast spot market prices in using artificial neural networks (ANN). ANNs are widely used in various applications especially in computational heuristics, where non-linear systems have computational challenges difficult to overcome because of the effect named 'curse of dimensionality'. This effect is due to the fact that the current computational power is not enough to handle problems with such a high combination of variables. The challenge of forecasting prices depends on factors such as: (a) foresee the demand evolution (electric load); (b) the forecast of supply (reservoirs, hydrology and climate), capacity factor; and (c) the balance of the economy (pricing, auctions, foreign markets influence, economic policy, government budget and government policy). These factors are considered be used in the forecasting model for spot market prices and the results of its effectiveness are tested and huge presented. (author)