UNC Charlotte Students Winning All Top 3 Spots of NPower Forecasting Challenge 2017

Every year, RWE npower, a large electricity generator and supplier of gas and electricity based in the United Kingdom hosts a forecasting competition to recruit summer interns. While the internships are only open to UK students, the competition is open to the world. Hundreds of students and working professionals have participated in these npower forecasting challenges in the past few years. Every time I sent a few students to the competition. Every time, they took a few the top spots (see 2015 electricity, 2015 gas, and 2016).

This year, 19 UK teams and 26 international teams joined the competition. Npower created a separate leaderboard for the UK students. The top 1 UK team would rank #9 among all teams. The screen shot below shows the top 8 teams. The official site is HERE.

For the first time, my students took all top 3 spots. They came from two of my classes: Technological Forecasting and Decision Making (Spring 2017) and Energy Analytics (Fall 2017). Most of them are currently enrolled in the master capstone projects under my supervision. My courses are among the most challenging ones in the college. The students had to spend tremendous amount of time to earn the credits. I'm glad that they have acquired some useful skills from the class and showed off their analytical capabilities through the competition. I asked the top teams to summarize their methodology in the comment field below.

Congratulations, 49ers!