Power of tech tools: Andhra using AI to control electricity purchase costs

Day-ahead predictions are critical, as they have implications for how much electricity should be generated in coal plants and how much should be purchased through the open market

Last year, as the country began grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic, the Transmission Corporation of Andhra Pradesh (APTransco), the state’s electric power transmission company, adopted a new method to cut the growing cost of electricity in the state.
 
Power purchases from the open market account for 80 per cent of the cost burden of the power sector. Hence, accurately predicting the demand for power the next day is critical to controlling costs. For the past 20 years, APTransco had been relying on manual methods to estimate the demand for power the next day.
 
In this method, the load