2013 Greetings from IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting

Thanks to the contributions from everyone involved in this community, our working group has had several significant accomplishments in 2013:

1. We developed a tutorial on "Energy Forecasting in the Smart Grid Era", which was attended by about 25 people in its first offering at PESGM2013. 
2. We also organized two panel sessions "Energy Forecasting: the State of the Art" and "Global Energy Forecasting Competition Final Presentations" at PESGM2013. These two sessions hosted 15 talks by 15 speakers from 9 countries, and were well attended by 100+ people.
3. We concluded GEFCom2012 with the 8 winning teams announced by IEEE PES. "GEFCom2012 is the largest known energy forecasting competition to date. Not only does it bring together many new ideas to the energy-forecasting field from data scientists in many different industries but the competition data has already been used by scholars for benchmarking purposes," quoted from the press release of IEEE PES, which was broadcasted by major media channel such as Yahoo Finance.
4. We edited the special section on "Analytics for Energy Forecasting with Applications to Smart Grid" for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, which collected 15 high quality papers. These papers are available on IEEE Xplore now and will be published early next year.

Next year will be another busy year for us:

1. We have scheduled two panel sessions on "Integrating Energy Forecasts into Power Systems Planning and Operations" at T&D 2014 and one panel session on "Load Forecasting: the State of the Practice" at PESGM2014.
2. We will launch GEFCom2014 in Fall of 2014. This new competition will have two major upgrades from last year's. There will be four tracks on load, price, wind and solar forecasting. All tracks will be probabilistic forecasting. For more information about GEFCom2014, please visit www.gefcom.org.
3. We will edit a special issue on probabilistic energy forecasting for International Journal of Forecasting. The Call For Papers is HERE. The extended abstract is due on Jan 31st, 2014.
4. We will edit another special issue for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. The Call For Papers will come out soon. Stay tuned.

The summary of our past and current activities can be found HERE. If you are interested in what's going on in our community, you are more than welcome to join the LinkedIn group and/or sign up my distribution list.

Happy holiday season to all!