2014 Greetings from IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting

Before I even realize it, the IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting is over three years old. This is the third annual greeting message since we started the working group in July 2011. Here I'm listing a few major accomplishments and activities in 2014:

• The size of IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting on LinkedIn has exceeded 1200. This is now the largest energy forecasting group and one of the largest forecasting groups on LinkedIn. 
• We launched the Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2014, a rolling energy forecasting competition lasting 16 weeks long. The competition attracted hundreds of participants worldwide joining the four tracks, probabilistic load/price/wind/solar forecasting. IEEE PES, the financial sponsor of the competition, made a press release, which was broadcasted by many major media outlets. We have also created a LinkedIn group to facilitate the discussions around the competition. 
• In 2014, we organized two panel sessions (Integrating Energy Forecasts into Utility Planning and Operations) in IEEE T&D conference and one panel session (Load Forecasting: the State of the Practice) in IEEE PES General meeting, The three sessions combined hosted 16 talks from 13 speakers. 
• The IEEE tutorial Energy Forecasting in the Smart Grid Era was offered at IEEE PES General Meeting 2014, and was again very well attended and highly rated. 
• The winning entries of GEFCom2012 have published their work on International Journal of Forecasting (special section on Energy Forecasting) and IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid (special section on Analytics for Energy Forecasting with Applications to Smart Grid). For more information, please read this post. 

The group has already planned its activities in 2015:

• We have scheduled a two half-day sessions on IEEE PES General Meeting 2015 to host presentations of the finalists of Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2014.
• We have been editing a special issue on Probabilistic Energy Forecasting for International Journal of Forecasting. This special issue will collect high quality papers from regular submissions and from winning teams of Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2014. 
• We will be teaching the IEEE tutorial Energy Forecasting in the Smart Grid Era at IEEE PES General Meeting 2015. 

Look forward to seeing you next year! Stay tuned with working group activities by joining our group on LinkedIn.

Happy holidays and happy forecasting!