Dear colleagues,

How time flies! IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting has just gone through another productive year.

In 2012, we have completed the following activities:

- We organized two very well-attended panel sessions at PESGM2012. The list of 15 topics can be found HERE. All panel papers and/or presentations have been published at IEEE Xplore.

- We organized Global Energy Forecasting Competition (GEFCom2012), which attracted hunderds of participants from all over the world.

What to expect in 2013?

- We will organize two panel sessions at PESGM2013 with 18 state-of-the-art presentations.

- There will be a few post-GEFCom2012 activities, which can be found HERE.

- We will complete the review process for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid Special Issue for Energy Forecasting with Applications to Smart Grid.

You are welcome to join the group on LinkedIn by clicking HERE.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all and your families!

Tao Hong, PhD

Chair, IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting

There are several activities following up GEFCom2012:

1. Nine finalists will present their work at IEEE PES General Meeting 2013. Four of them are from the hierarchical load forecasting track: Colin Singleton from CountingLab Ltd, James Robert Lloyd from University of Cambridge, Raphael Nédellec from EDF R&D, and Souhaib Ben Taieb from Université Libre de Bruxelles. Five of them are from the wind power forecasting track: Lucas Eustaquio from DTI Sistemas, Ekaterina Mangalova from Siberian State Aerospace University, Matt Wytock from Carnegie Mellon University, Gabor I. Nagy from Budapset University of Technology and Economics, and Duehee Lee from University of Texas at Austin.

2. International Journal of Forecasting (IJF) will publish a few short papers from GEFCom2012, including one introduction paper and several other papers describing the methodologies used by the top teams. The competition data including the results will be published with the introduction paper.

3. IEEE Transactions of Smart Grid will publish a few full papers from GEFCom2012 in the Special Issue on Analytics for Energy Forecasting with Applications to Smart Grid.

Thank Kaggle's data scientists, the Advisory Committee and the officers of GEFCom2012, and of course hunderds of contestants who made this competition a fantastic and exciting event! While we are still accepting reports from the contestants for final evaluation, I can't wait to share some summary statistics with you all.

There are two tracks in GEFCom2012, hierarchical load forecasting and wind power forecasting. During the planning stage, we have received over 100 sign-ups across more than 30 countries in total. As of today...

In the hierarchical load forecasting track:

651 unique users have downloaded the data;

107 teams with 160 participants and 1010 entries;

27 teams have got better scores than Tao's Vanilla Benchmark.

In the wind power forecasting track:

Up to date, 100+ people from the following 31 countries have filled in the Call For Participants survey:
Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK, US
While Kaggle is setting up the online competition environment for us, here are some more details about the competition:
1. GEFCom is not a paper contest. Instead, this is a competition that requires participants to develop models and submit forecasts based on a given data set. Accuracy of the forecasts will be one evaluation criteria.
2. In addition to accuracy, the participants are also required to submit a report describing the methodology, findings and models. Selected entries will be invited to IEEE PES General Meeting 2013 at Vancouver, Canada to present their methodologies and results. The final winners will be determined by the GEFCom Award Committee after the presentations based on forecasting accuracy, clarity of documentation, rigors of the approach, interpretability of the models and practicality to the industry.
3. A few entries will be invited to submit the report in scientific paper format to prestigious scholarly journals, such as International Journal of Forecasting and IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid.
4. The competition will be hosted at Kaggle.com. We do encourage you to register an account at Kaggle if you haven't done so and take a look at how other competitions were conducted in the past.
5. We plan to start the competition on 8/31/2012 and end it on 10/31/2012.
6. For both load forecasting and wind forecasting tracks, you will be doing forecasts for multiple series. You can join either track or both tracks. We expect one to spend 80+ hours to get some decent forecasts for each track.
7. You can collaborate with your co-works or friends to form teams to join the competition.
8. You can also join the competition on behave of your company.
(The information below is about the load forecasting track):
9. 20 load series at delivery point level and 11 temperature series for a US utility will be given at the load forecasting track.
10. In each load series, 8 nonconsecutive weeks were taken out from the history. For each of the 20 series, the participants are required to backcast the 8 weeks in the history and the one week immediately following the history period. In addition, the participants are required to backcast the 8 weeks in the history and forecast 1 week after the history period at the system level, which is the sum of the 20 series.
11. Temperature data is available throughout the history, but not available for the one week following the history period. The use of temperature data is optional. The participants can make their own decision.
12. Different weights will be given at different levels and weeks when evaluating accuracy: weight of the last week at system level > weight of a history week at system level > weight of the last week at delivery point level > weight of a history week at delivery point level.
13. In each hour, sum of delivery point level loads is required to be equal to the system level load. Submissions that violate this requirement will be disqualified.
14. Complete instructions will be provided through Kaggle and our competition webpage.

There are three exciting events going on in the energy forecasting community:

Over 50 teams across 25 countries have signed up the Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2012. Please visit the competition webpage for more information, such as Call For Participants, Important Dates, etc.

IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting is hosting three sessions in PESGM2012:

Panel Session – “Load forecasting methodologies and applications in operations and planning”: Room Emma AB, Monday, July 23, 2012, 13:00 – 17:00;

Energy Forecasting Working Group Meeting: Room Windsor B, Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 14:00 – 16:00;

Panel Session – “Demand response: analytics, practice, and challenges in smart grid environment”, Room Emma A, Thursday, July 26, 2012, 13:00 – 17:00.

More information about the topics to be presented in the panel sessions can be found here.

This special issue of IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid covers both challenges and opportunities for the energy forecasting communities, and will bring together the state-of-the-art analytics, technologies and best practices in the smart grid industry. The extended abstract is due on Sep 30th, 2012. For more information, please refer to the Call For Papers.