LSTM-Based Smart City Energy Demand Forecasting and Power Generation Optimization System

This article explores the application of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks in smart city energy management, aiming to solve the problem that traditional energy scheduling relies on static models which struggle to handle dynamic electricity demand. It achieves accurate energy demand forecasting and power generation optimization, providing a scientific decision-making basis for urban sustainable development.

With the acceleration of global urbanization, smart city energy management faces many challenges: traditional scheduling relies on static models that are difficult to handle dynamic electricity demand; peak power shortages, intermittent generation from renewable energy sources, and unbalanced grid loads all restrict urban sustainable development. Artificial intelligence technologies (especially LSTM) bring revolutionary solutions to energy management.

LSTM is a special RNN architecture proposed in 1997. It solves the gradient vanishing problem through a gating mechanism and can learn long-term dependencies. Core gating units: forget gate (filters historical information), input gate (selectively injects new information), output gate (adjusts memory output). It is suitable for processing periodic and trending time-series data (such as energy consumption).

The LSTM model uses multi-variable inputs, with features including historical load data, meteorological parameters, time features, economic indicators, etc. Data preprocessing requires normalization and sliding window sample construction; the loss function uses MSE or MAE, the optimizer is Adam, and overfitting is prevented through Dropout and early stopping.

Implemented based on prediction results: short-term scheduling optimization (coordinate unit and energy storage output within 24 hours to minimize costs); medium-term planning optimization (balance renewable energy uncertainty from one week to one month and formulate plans); demand response coordination (send price signals during peak hours to encourage users to adjust electricity usage).

Economic benefits: reduce power generation reserve capacity by 15%-20%, saving tens of millions of dollars annually for medium-sized cities; environmental benefits: increase the absorption ratio of renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions; system reliability: identify abnormal electricity usage in advance and reduce the probability of power outages.

Limitations: weak ability to predict extreme weather, cold start problems due to insufficient data in newly built urban areas. Future directions: LSTM variants integrating attention mechanisms, combining graph neural networks to handle spatial energy flow, and federated learning frameworks to achieve multi-city collaborative modeling.

The LSTM-based system is an important development direction for smart grids, providing decision-making basis by mining time-series patterns. With algorithm evolution and decreasing computing power costs, it will be promoted in more cities to help global energy transition.