Study on the Impact of Electrical Substitution Coefficient on Natural Gas Load Forecasting Under Deep Electrification Scenario for Sustainable Energy Systems

Against the backdrop of the global energy transition toward deep electrification, the natural gas industry faces challenges, including increased load forecasting uncertainty and frequent extreme weather impacts. To enhance natural gas load forecasting accuracy and support system resilience planning, this study constructs a forecasting model based on quadratic decomposition and hybrid deep learning, incorporating an electricity substitution coefficient to characterize the coupling substitution effect between electricity and natural gas. Under the basic scenario, the VMD-WPD-TCN-BiGRU model is proposed. It employs variational mode decomposition and wavelet packet denoising for secondary signal denoising, combined with a time-series convolutional network and bidirectional gated recurrent unit to extract temporal features. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to mainstream methods such as CNN, BiLSTM, SVM, and XGBoost, this model achieves statistically significant reductions in MSE (11.11–96.21%), MAE (0.89–76.50%), and MAPE (4.10–67.94%), significantly improving forecasting accuracy. In the deep electrification scenario, the introduction of the electricity substitution coefficient further optimizes peak load forecasting for system pressure days under extreme low temperatures, elevating the overall R 2 to 0.9905 in the deep electrification scenario. Research indicates that the proposed model not only effectively improves the accuracy of short-term natural gas load forecasting but also provides quantitative support for enterprises to plan peak-shaving facilities, optimize pipeline networks, and respond to extreme weather emergencies in data silo environments. This contributes to strengthening the adaptability and long-term resilience of natural gas systems during the energy transition, thereby supporting the sustainable development of energy infrastructure.