The widespread popularity of smart meters enables an immense amount of fine-grained electricity consumption data to be collected. Meanwhile, the deregulation of the power industry, particularly on the delivery side, has continuously been moving forward worldwide. How to employ massive smart meter data to promote and enhance the efficiency and sustainability of the power grid is a pressing issue. To date, substantial works have been conducted on smart meter data analytics. To provide a comprehensive overview of the current research and to identify challenges for future research, this paper conducts an application-oriented review of smart meter data analytics. Following the three stages of analytics, namely, descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics, we identify the key application areas as load analysis, load forecasting, and load management. We also review the techniques and methodologies adopted or developed to address each application. In addition, we also discuss some research trends, such as big data issues, novel machine learning technologies, new business models, the transition of energy systems, and data privacy and security.

Forecasting has been an essential part of the power and energy industry. Researchers and practitioners have contributed thousands of papers on forecasting electricity demand and prices, and renewable generation (e.g., wind and solar power). This paper offers a brief review of influential energy forecasting papers; summarizes research trends; discusses importance of reproducible research and points out six valuable open data sources; makes recommendations about publishing highquality research papers; and offers an outlook into the future of energy forecasting.

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The installation of smart meters enables the collection of massive fine-grained electricity consumption data and makes individual consumer level load forecasting possible. Compared to aggregated loads, load forecasting for individual consumers is prone to non-stationary and stochastic features. In this paper, a probabilistic load forecasting method for individual consumers is proposed to handle the variability and uncertainty of future load profiles. Specifically, a deep neural network, long short-term memory (LSTM), is used to model both the long-term and short-term dependencies within the load profiles. Pinball loss, instead of the mean square error (MSE), is used to guide the training of the parameters. In this way, traditional LSTM-based point forecasting is extended to probabilistic forecasting in the form of quantiles. Numerical experiments are conducted on an open dataset from Ireland. Forecasting for both residential and commercial consumers is tested. Results show that the proposed method has superior performance over traditional methods.

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