2015 Greetings from IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting

The holiday season is coming again. As always, I'm pleased to list the accomplishments made by our working group in 2015:

• The size of IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting on LinkedIn has exceeded 1500, or more specifically, 1507 members as of 12/21/2015. Its subgroup Global Energy Forecasting Competition created last year has attracted 485 members.  
• We have completed the first round of reviews for the short papers submitted to the TSG special section on Big Data Analytics for Grid Modernization. The guest editors are now busy with handling the full papers. 
• Shu Fan, Hamidreza Zareipour and I taught the IEEE tutorial Energy Forecasting in the Smart Grid Era at IEEE PES General Meeting 2015, which was again highly rated by over 20 attendees. 
• We organized two panel sessions and one mini reception for GEFCom2014 at IEEE PES General Meeting 2015. The two panel sessions together hosted 16 presentations from GEFCom2014 organizers and winners and were attended by over 100 professionals and students. IEEE PES announced the winning teams and universities in October, 2015. 
• Pierre Pinson and I edited the IJF special issue on Probabilistic Energy Forecasting. This special issue will include papers from GEFCom2014 winners and some non-GEFCom2014 papers. Some of them are available now on Science Direct. The special issue will be published next year. 
• We completed a survey to figure out the journals that publish best energy forecasting papers. The survey results lead to JREF: Journal Rankings in Energy Forecasting (2015).

Here are the planned activities in 2016.

• We will finalize the IJF special issue on probabilistic energy forecasting.
• We will finalize the TSG special section on big data analytics for grid modernization. 
• The four of us (Shu Fan, Pierre Pinson, Hamidreza Zareipour and I) will be teaching the IEEE tutorial Energy Forecasting in the Smart Grid Era at IEEE PES General Meeting 2016. This will be the second time all of us are teaching together. The first time was in 2013 in the inaugural offering of this tutorial. 
• We will have a panel session on renewable integration co-chaired by Ning Zhang and Pierre Pinson at IEEE PES General Meeting 2016.
• We will launch GEFCom2016. At this stage, we haven't decided the topic yet. If you have any ideas, please let me know.
• We will conduct the JREF survey again to update the journal rankings. 

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Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Forecasting!