Green-AI-Aware Smart Grid Stability Prediction Using Hybrid CNN, Random Forest, and XGBoost Fusion

The increasing integration of renewable energy sources and smart grid (SG) technologies introduces significant challenges to power system stability due to the inherent variability and uncertainty of electricity generation and demand. While many machine learning and deep learning approaches have been proposed for stability prediction, various studies focus only on predictive performance and offer limited assessment of computational efficiency, statistical significance, and sustainability-related metrics. To address these gaps, this study suggests a hybrid fusion approach that combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Random Forest (RF) classifiers through a soft voting strategy for SG stability prediction. The CNN component automatically extracts representative features, while XGBoost and RF contribute complementary classification capabilities, reducing the need for manual feature engineering. In addition to predictive evaluation, a Green AI-oriented benchmarking framework is introduced to evaluate model performance using predictive accuracy, computational runtime, memory consumption, and estimated computational CO2 emissions associated with model training and inference. The proposed framework is assessed on the UCI SG Stability dataset using stratified cross-validation and statistical significance testing, including Friedman and Nemenyi post hoc analyses. Experimental results demonstrate that the fusion model achieves 97.68% classification accuracy and an AUC of 0.991, exceeding several individual machine learning, deep learning, and ensemble baselines. Statistical analysis shows significant improvements over recurrent deep learning models such as LSTM and GRU. However, the differences from strong tree-based methods, including XGBoost and RF, are not statistically significant. Furthermore, the proposed model reaches a high sustainability score of 0.802, indicating a favorable balance between predictive performance and computational resource requirements. The findings show that the proposed framework is effective and computationally efficient to predict the stability of the smart grid on the UCI benchmark dataset and also serves as a transparent green AI benchmarking methodology for comparative studies in the future. The validation of the approach on real-world smart grid data under noisy, not fully complete, and heterogeneous operating conditions is another interesting research direction for future work.