O2O Demand Forecasting @ISF2026, Montreal

My first International Symposium of Forecasting, a.k.a. ISF, was in Rotterdam in 2014, when I made a presentation about Global Energy Forecasting Competitions. I loved the conference and community, so I came back to ISF2015 in Riverside, CA, and the following year in Santander, Spain. Since 2014, I have attended every ISF except the one in Oxford due to COVID. I was elected as a director of International Institute of Forecasters in 2017, and re-elected in 2021. I co-chaired the ISF2025 in Beijing, right after the end of my second (and last) term. 

During past 9 years, I was involved more as an organizer than a conference attendee. My attention was mostly on how well the conference was run, how coherent the program was, and how to better serve the members of IIF. As the premier conference in forecasting, ISF only allows a speaker to make one presentation. I did not really put in too many thoughts about the one and only presentation I can give at ISF. Of course, I chose the easiest route, presenting an energy forecasting talk every time. 

This year, I realized that I now had an opportunity to enjoy ISF as an attendee. Maybe I should try something different for my conference talk. Well, I did. I picked a topic in online take-out food delivery: A three-level hierarchy for O2O demand forecasting. It's based on a paper recently accepted by the International Journal of Forecasting. 

Our IJF paper should be online soon, but I want to share some takeaways outside the paper, which might be beneficial to the forecasters from other fields.

1. It takes some courage to break the status quo.

This IJF paper was related to hierarchical forecasting of online to offline takeout food delivery demand. The original ask was just to develop the forecasts, which could have been done simply by using some off-the-shelf software packages. However, we quickly found out that the existing hierarchy was not optimal for neither business management nor hierarchical forecasting. We then took a detour to investigate the methodologies to construct the hierarchy, which eventually turned into this paper. 

2. The same idea can be applied to seemingly different applications and industries

The core idea of this IJF paper was originally from my master thesis back in 2008. It was later adopted by my wife in her doctoral dissertation in 2010. My master thesis was on electric load forecasting, while her dissertation was on supply chain. The O2O forecasting problem did not even exist at that time! Sometimes we just need to think outside the box, or explore outside the traditional boundaries of the disciplines.

3. It's important to build a comprehensive toolbox early. 

During my years as a student, I took many courses from many different departments. Some were due to degree requirements, while others were not closely related to the degrees I was pursuing. At that time, I often wondered whether those materials were going to be useful. For instance, as of today, I have never directly applied anything I learned w.r.t. assembly language. On the other hand, I have encountered a good number of problems that I could solve easily thanks to the tools I picked up in school. This paper is an example. The methodology we proposed involves clustering. To invent custom solutions to this novel problem, we need some decent understanding of optimization. Without those tools, I would have not even thought about customizing the hierarchy for hierarchical forecasting. 

4. IJF editors and reviewers are awesome!!!

This paper went through many rounds of review. I think it's four or five rounds. If counting the reproducibility check, it's even more. I really appreciate the detailed and constructive criticisms offered by the editors and reviewers. It took us a significant amount of time to revise the paper, which helped improve our work. Unfortunately I don't know who they are due to the double-blind review process. Here I want to express my sincere gratitude for them to invest the time helping us make the paper better.

My talk was very well attended with standing room only. Some folks later told me that they couldn't get into the session because the classroom was so packed. I think I made a good decision to break the status quo, by presenting a non-energy talk at ISF.

Mark your calendar for the 47th ISF, Paphos, Cyprus, June 20th to 23rd, 2027.

International Symposium on Energy Analytics 2025

I know some of you have been waiting for more than 7 years.... 

The 2nd International Symposium on Energy Analytics is only one month away. If you are not sure whether to attend ISEA2025 or not, here are seven reasons:

1. Join the IIF Distinguished Lecture Series, in person.

Electricity is the most volatile commodity in the world. Forecasting its prices is hard! Rafal Weron is going to deliver his IIF Distinguished Lecture Series on electricity price forecasting at ISEA2025. ISEA audience will be able to sit in the classroom taught by the electricity price forecasting guru.

2. Learn from the success stories of IIF-SAS awardees.

IIF and SAS has been in collaboration to offer the IIF-SAS award for more than 20 years. During the past decade, an energy forecasting proposal is awarded every one or two years. ISEA2025 includes presentations of five recent IIF-SAS awards in energy forecasting. ISEA audience will have the opportunity to learn from these funded projects, and hopefully become the next $10,000 award winner in the coming years.

3. Understand the emerging needs of the industry.

Renowned vendors and seasoned practitioners are speaking at ISEA2025, about the emerging problems and trending solutions. Whether you are a researcher looking for real-world problems, or a practitioner seeking benchmarks, ISEA is the place to be. 

4. Hire rising stars.

ISEA2025 has a special registration rate for students. There will be a student presentation session as well. Having a hard time to fill in the energy data scientist vacancies in your group? Come to ISEA to hire the rising stars. 

5. Connect with SWEET.

IIF Section on Water, Energy and Environment (SWEET) is the home for energy forecasters. The leadership team of SWEET will be attending ISEA2025. Let's talk to them and find out all the SWEET opportunities.

6. Network with Foresight practitioners.

ISEA2025 will be hosted in parallel with the Foresight Practitioners Conference, which features practitioner speakers and finalists of the inaugural Forecasting Practice Competition. Energy forecasters will have the opportunities to network with the forecasters from other business sectors. BTW, one of the finalists is an energy company!

7. Enjoy the IIF Foresight online membership for free. 

Thanks to the financial support from IIF and the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department of UNC Charlotte, we are able to keep the registration fees quite low. To put a cherry on top, we offer each paid registration one-year IIF Foresight online membership for free. 

ISEA2025 will be hosted at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, March 3-4, 2025, with the theme Energy Analytics: State of the Practice. Registration deadline is Feb 20th.

Look forward to seeing you in a month!

SWEET Sessions @ ISF2019

Update 6/21/2019: the SWEET presentations can be downloaded via this Dropbox link. The next ISF will be held at Rio, Brazil, July 5-8, 2020. Look forward to seeing you there!

At the board meeting during the 38th International Symposium on Forecasting (ISF2018), I proposed the idea of developing interest groups or communities within the International Institute of Forecasters (IIF) to better offer a collaborative environment and networking opportunities to forecasting researchers and practitioners. Right after ISF2018, I worked with George Athanasopoulos, Stephan Kolassa and Pam Straud to develop a formal proposal to the IIF Board of Directors. The board approved the launch of two communities at the end of last year. One of them is the Section on Water, Energy and Environment (SWEET).

ISF2019 will be held at Thessaloniki, Greece, June 16 - 19. The conference program committee has dedicated a full 3-day track to SWEET. In total, 43 speakers will cover a wide range of topics in 13 sessions, including gas and electricity demand forecasting, wind and solar forecasting, water demand and hydro generation forecasting, water and air quality forecasting, and energy price forecasting. In addition, we will hold the first SWEET member meeting on Monday June 17, right before the IIF member meeting.

If you are interested in ISF2019, please check out the program schedule. Below is the list of SWEET talks:

Electricity Demand 1: Data Resolution

1. Forecasting individual electric utility customer hourly loads from AMI data
2. Development of an end-use load forecasting model for Peninsular Malaysia
3. Daily peak load forecasting with mixed-frequency input data

Electricity Demand 2: Short Term Load Forecasting

1. Evaluation of multi-horizon strategies for electricity load forecasting
2. Zero initialization of modified gated recurrent encoder-decoder network for short term load forecasting
3. Impact of meteorological variables in short-term electric load forecasting

Electricity Demand 3: Load & Price

1. Determining the demand elasticity in a wholesale electricity market
2. Horse and Cart: a scalable electricity load and price forecast model
3. Temporal hierarchies with autocorrelation for load forecasting

Electricity Demand 4: Statistics vs. Machine Learning

1. Forecasting time series with multiple seasonal patterns using a long short-term memory neural network methodology
2. Statistical and machine learning methods combination for improved energy consumption forecasting performance
3. Probabilistic forecasting of electricity demand using Markov chain and statistical distribution

Electricity Price 1: German Market

1. Econometric modelling and forecasting of intraday electricity prices
2. On the importance of cross-border market integration under XBID: evidence from the German intraday market
3. A generative model for multivariate probabilistic scenario forecasting

Electricity Price 2: Probabilistic Forecasting

1. Averaging probabilistic forecasts of day-ahead electricity prices across calibration windows
2. Regularization for quantile regression averaging. A new approach to constructing probabilistic forecasts
3. Revisiting the jackknife method for construction of prediction intervals – application to electricity market

Electricity Price 3

1. Forecasting Italian spot electricity prices using random forests and intra-daily market information
2. Forecasting Northern Italian electricity prices
3. Application of a SVM-based model for day-ahead electricity price prediction for the single electricity market in Ireland

Electricity Price 4

1. Day-ahead vs. intraday - forecasting the price spread to maximize economic benefits
2. Enhancing wind and solar generation forecasts to yield better short-term electricity price predictions
3. Prediction intervals in high-dimensional regression

Energy

1. Forecasting algorithm assignment to distribution grid service points in the context of demand response
2. Modelling uncertainty: probabilistic load forecasting using weather ensemble predictions
3. Understanding the impacts of distributed PV resources on short-term load forecasting – a comparative study on solar data availability
4. Access forecasting for safety-critical crew transfers in offshore environments

Environment

1. A feature-based framework for detecting technical outliers in water-quality data from in situ sensors
2. Probabilistic forecasting models for NO2 concentrations
3. Probabilistic forecasting of an air quality index

Oil & Gas

1. Forecasting oil and natural gas prices with futures and threshold models
2. Ensemble-based approaches and regularization techniques to enhance natural gas consumption forecasts
3. A multi-granularity heterogeneous combination approach to crude oil price
4. Predicting Natural Gas Pipeline Alarms

Water

1. Forecasting power generation for small hydropower plants using inflow data from neighboring basins
2. Probabilistic short-term water demand forecasting
3. When is water consumption extreme?
4. Forecasting water usage demand in Sydney

Wind & Solar

1. A comparison of wind speed probabilistic forecast via quantile regression models
2. Online distributed learning in wind power forecasting
3. Probabilistic solar power forecasting: long short-term memory network vs. simpler approaches
4. A non-parametric approach to wind power forecast

If you can't join the conference but want to stay informed about SWEET activities, you can sign up for the SWEET News Letter. 

A Look Back at ISEA2017

About a year ago, I posted 7 reasons to attend ISEA2017. Last June, we had our very first International Symposium on Energy Analytics at the beautiful city Cairns, Australia. 50 researchers and practitioners from industry and academia across 16 countries attended the symposium. 36 of them also attended ISF2017.

The two-day agenda included 5 keynote presentations, 13 contributed presentations selected from 31 abstract submissions, and 5 GEFCom2017 finalists presentations. At the end of the first day, June 22, 2017, we hosted the GEFCom2017 award ceremony followed by a two-hour cocktail reception. The program agenda, presentations and pictures can be downloaded via THIS LINK.

We have been processing the full paper submissions since then. So far, three papers are currently in press with the Journal of Modern Power Systems and Clean Energy, one is in press with the Power & Energy Magazine. The remaining papers are going through the peer review system of the International Journal of Forecasting. The accepted ones together with the GEFCom2017 articles are going to be published in an energy forecasting special section edited by Pierre Pinson and myself.  

I want to thank many people who made ISEA2017 a successful event, the keynote speakers, the presenters, the GEFCom2017 winners, and all the attendees of ISEA2017. Special thanks to Rob Hyndman and George Athanasopoulos for the strong local support, our photographer Mitchell O'Hara-Wild for capturing the happy moments, and Pam Stroud for handling the registrations and helping keep things in order. 

Last but not least, big thanks to our sponsors, International Institute of Forecasters, Tangent Works and Journal of Modern Power Systems and Clean Energy, for their generous financial support that helped to keep the registration fees low. 

Many people have asked me about the next ISEA. I know there will be the next one, but I don't know when and where. If you have any idea or want to help with organizing ISEA, let me know! 

Mark Your 2017 Calendar: Tao's Recommended Conferences for Energy Forecasters

I didn't realize the overdue of this post until I just hit the road for my first trip of 2017. Here is the 2017 list of my recommended conferences for energy forecasters:

1. International Symposium on Energy Analytics (ISEA2017, Cairns, Australia, June 22-23, 2017)

Even if you missed all the other events down this list, you can still find the year rewarding by attending ISEA2017, the first-ever gathering of world-wide energy forecasters. Our generous sponsors, the International Institute of Forecasters (Super Sponsor), Tangent Works (Gigawatt Sponsor) and the State Grid Electric Power Research Institute (Kilowatt Sponsor), have helped bring the registration fees down. There are many reasons to join the party. You will meet the winners of GEFCom2017. You will hear the presentations from world-class energy forecasting researchers and practitioners. You will network with energy forecasting colleagues from more than a dozen countries. And of course, you will enjoy two World Heritage sites side-by-side.

2. Tao's courses

The next two SAS courses on load forecasting have been scheduled in Charlotte, March 27-29.

• Electric Load Forecasting: Fundamentals and Best Practices
• Electric Load Forecasting: Advanced Topics and Case Studies

In addition, I'm going to teach these three courses through EUCI:

• Fundamentals of Utility Analytics: Techniques, Applications and Case Studies
• Introduction to Energy Forecasting
• Long Term Load Forecasting

Stay tuned with the training page of Hong Analytics for the recent updates of all training courses.

3. Conferences from other professional organizations

I will attend the following three, as always:

• International Symposium on Forecasting (ISF2017, Cairns, Australia, June 25-28, 2017)
• IEEE PES General Meeting (PESGM2017, Chicago, IL, USA, July 16-20, 2017)
• AEIC/WLRA Annual Conference (Time & Location TBD)

Look forward to seeing you in these fantastic events!

Southwest Forecasting and Customer Analytics Forum 2016

Southwest Forecasting and Customer Analytics Forum 

Hosted By Tucson Electric Power, September 15-16, 2016

Tucson Electric Power is pleased to host the Southwest Forecasting and Customer Analytics Conference for the utility industry at its downtown Tucson headquarters.  Topics and events covered in the program:

• Perspective on Using Forecasts by David G. Hutchens, President and CEO, TEP and its parent company, UNS Energy Corporation
• The Evolving Regulated Utility Industry – Prof. Stanley Reynolds, University of Arizona
• Energy Forecasting: Past, Present, and Future – Prof. Tao Hong, UNC at Charlotte
• How Will Battery Storage Deployment Affect Load Forecasting? – Jason Burwen, ESA
• Impact and Value of Plug-in Electric Vehicle Load & Managed Charging – R. Graham, U.S. Energy Department and Dr. Hongyan Sheng, Southern California Edison
• Location-Specific Probabilistic Forecasting and Planning Methods – Josh Bode, Nexant
• Home Appliances: Historical Declines in Energy Use, Future Potential Savings, and an Update on Efficiency Standards – Joanna Mauer, Appliance Standards Awareness Project
• Likelihood of Customer Participation in Utility Programs – Dr. Erin Boyd, Pacific Gas & Electric
• Networking Dinner

The only cost of this program is your own travel to Tucson, Arizona and the cost of dinner.  For details, see the program HERE.

Call For Papers: 2017 International Symposium on Energy Analytics (ISEA2017)

2017 International Symposium on Energy Analytics

(ISEA2017)

Cairns, Australia, June 22-23, 2017

Predictive Energy Analytics in the Big Data World

Modern information and communication technologies have brought big data to virtually every segment of the energy and utility industries. While predictive analytics is an important and necessary step in the data-driven decision-making process, how to generate better forecasts in the big data world is an emerging issue and challenge to both industry and academia.

This symposium aims at bringing forecasting experts and practitioners together to share experiences and best practices on a wide range of important business problems in the energy industry. Here the energy industry broadly covers utilities, oil, gas and mining industries. The subjects to be forecasted range from supply, demand and price, to asset/system condition and customer count.

The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Probabilistic energy forecasting
• Hierarchical energy forecasting
• High-dimensional energy forecasting
• High-frequency and high-resolution energy forecasting
• Equipment failure prediction
• Power systems fault prediction
• Automatic outlier detection
• Load profiling
• Customer segmentation
• Customer churn prediction

If you are interested in contributing a presentation to this symposium, please submit a one-page extended abstract to both guest editors via email with the subject line “ISEA2017 Abstract Submission”. Authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers to the International Journal of Forecasting (IJF) or Power and Energy Magazine.

Important ISEA2017 dates

• Abstract submission open - November 15, 2016
• Abstract submission due - January 15, 2017
• Abstract acceptance - February 15, 2017
• Early registration deadline - April 14, 2017
• ISEA2017 - June 22-23, 2017
• ISF2017 - June 25-28, 2017
• Paper submission for consideration of journal/magazine publication - June 30, 2017

Important publication dates

• First round review completion - August 31, 2017
• Final version ready for Power and Energy Magazine - October 31, 2017
• Final version ready for IJF - December 31, 2017
• Power and Energy Magazine special issue publication - May/June, 2018
• IJF special section publication - 2018

Guest Editors:
Tao Hong, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA (hong@uncc.edu)
Pierre Pinson, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark (ppin@elektro.dtu.dk)

Editor-in-Chief
Rob J Hyndman, Monash University, Australia
International Journal of Forecasting

How to Write Conference Papers

Every year, IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) organizes many conferences all over the world. Here are some conferences of my interest:

1. IEEE PES General Meeting (PESGM)
2. North American Power Symposium (NAPS)
3. IEEE PES Transmission & Distribution Conference and Exposition (T&D)
4. International Conference on Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems (PMAPS)

All of these conferences nowadays accept papers with the size of 5 pages. While PES posts the general guideline for preparing conference papers, I'm putting together some tips for my students and those who are writing forecasting papers.

You may upgrade a PES conference paper to a journal paper with at least 40% new content. In other words, if you want to publish your work in a journal eventually, do not send the complete version to a conference. That said, how to identify the topics for conference papers? Here are some thoughts.

1. Apply the methodology from a recently published journal paper to a new data set, to support the methodology with another case study. 
2. A journal paper may have not elaborated everything comprehensively. You can identify the gap and offer a supplemental view in a conference paper. My T&D2016 paper falls in this category. 
3. There is no perfect forecasting methodology. If you find a way to marginally improve the methodology from a recently published journal paper, you may publish your improved method in a conference paper. Note that if the improvement is significant, you may consider sending the work to a journal. 
4. If you have some preliminary results from your research, you can put them in a conference paper to get some feedback from the reviewers and conference attendees.
5. If you have participated in a forecasting competition, you may publish your methodology in a conference paper. My NAPS2015 paper falls in this category. Note that if the competition is as notable as GEFCom2012 or GEFCom2014, and your ranking is high, you may consider sending the paper to a journal. 
6. You may put together a short review on a very specific topic in a conference paper. My REPC2014 paper falls in this category.

Here are some additional tips for publishing the work as a conference paper:

1. You only have 5 pages to tell a self-contained story, so do not stretch the topic too broad or too deep. 
2. The reviewers may not look into the details of your paper beyond the title and abstract, so put a big effort on the title and abstract. 
3. The reviewers may recommend a rejection right away if your paper has too many typos, grammatical errors and formatting issues. Please proofread your paper carefully before submission.
4. Pay attention to the track or committee during submission. You'd better send the paper to the committees that value the topic.
5. You may have up to one round of revision. Make sure that you address the review comments as much as possible in your revision.

Best luck with preparing your conference papers!

Mark Your 2016 Calendar: Tao's Recommended Conferences for Energy Forecasters

Last year I made a list of recommended conferences for energy forecasters. I think it is time to refresh the list for my 2016 calendar. Hopefully you will find the list useful as well.

1. Tao's courses

The next two SAS courses on load forecasting have been scheduled in Charlotte, March 9-11.

• Electric Load Forecasting: Fundamentals and Best Practices
• Electric Load Forecasting: Advanced Topics and Case Studies

I'm also going to teach three courses through EUCI:

• Fundamentals of Utility Analytics: Techniques, Applications and Case Studies
• Introduction to Energy Forecasting
• Long Term Load Forecasting

Stay tuned with the training page of Hong Analytics for the recent updates of all training courses.

2. 2016 PES T&D Conference & Exposition (T&D2016, Dallas, TX, May 2-5, 2016)

This is a bi-annual conference gathering "more than 700 companies and thousands of professionals from more than 80 countries around the world". Although the conference does not have much to do with forecasting, the exposition is indeed eye-opening. It is important for an energy forecaster to understand how the power grid is operated. This conference is that one-stop shop to see the new products and service offerings from the major industry players. I've been attending this conference since 2010. This year I'm going to present a paper "from high-resolution data to high-resolution probabilistic load forecasts".

3. 13th International Conference on the European Energy Market (EEM16, Porto, Portugal, June 6-9, 2016)

The conference organizing committee is launching an electricity price forecasting competition. It will be interesting to hear the methodologies used by the winners.

4. 36th International Symposium on Forecasting (ISF2016, Santander, Spain, June 19-22, 2016)

I'm organizing a session "load forecasting: research progress and challenges" at ISF2016. The session includes four talks:
What’s new in load forecasting since 2010? 
    Tao Hong | University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
Load forecasting using Lasso based time series methods
    Florian Ziel | European University Viadrina, Germany
Analysis of ex-ante probabilistic load forecasts at the low voltage substation level
    Stephen Haben, Siddharth Arora, Georgios Giasemidis, Tamsin Lee | University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Aggregate consistent forecasting algorithms for hierarchical electricity demand data
    Souhaib Ben Taieb | Monash University, Australia.
    James W. Taylor | University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
    Rob J. Hyndman | Monash University, Australia.

5. IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting 2016 (PESGM2016, Boston, MA, July 17-21, 2016)

We will have the 4th offering of our tutorial "energy forecasting in the smart grid era".

6. AEIC/WLRA annual conference (Chicago, IL, September 18-21, 2016)

AEIC Load Research Committee and Western Load Research Association will again have their joint meeting in Chicago.

7. 2016 International Conference on Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems (PMAPS2016, Beijing, China, October 16-20, 2016)

This is also a bi-annual conference. The conference plays a big emphasis on dealing with uncertainties in power systems,  which is highly related to probabilistic forecasting. The full paper is due on March 31.

Happy Valentine's Day, and happy traveling!

GEFCom2014 Presentations at PESGM2015

Over the past few months, I have received numerous requests asking for the GEFCom2014 data, papers and presentation files. Recently I managed to compile all the GEFCom2014 Presentations at PESGM2015. Here is the LINK to the ZIP file on OneDrive. I will compile and upload the data by the end of the year. The papers will be published in 2016.

Stay tuned...

What's New in Energy Forecasting - Jun 2015

It's time for the mid-year report and summary of the exciting events in the energy forecasting community:

1. Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2014

The competition was launched in August 2014 and ended in December 2014. We are now in the stage of post-competition activities, such as organizing conference presentations and paper publications. Many finalists of the competition will gather at the IEEE PES General Meeting 2015. The papers are expected to be published in the IJF special issue on probabilistic energy forecasting in early 2016. To follow the update of this competition and future events, please join this LinkedIn group.

2. Activities at IEEE PES General Meeting

Energy Forecasting Talks at ISF2015

It's only one week toward the International Symposium on Forecasting 2015. I took a brief look at the program and found 5 sessions including 14 talks on energy forecasting. The at-a-glance program schedule is available HERE.

Energy Forecasting Activities at PESGM2015

IEEE Power & Energy Society just released the technical program agenda for PESGM2015. I'm pleased to highlight the two days on energy forecasting organized by our working group.

Please note that the Wednesday afternoon's panel session is in Plaza 3. We also added a reception on Wednesday evening.

Saturday, July 26, 2015

Energy Forecasting in the Smart Grid Era (full-day tutorial)
8:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Instructors: Tao Hong, Shu Fan, Hamidreza Zareipour, and Pierre Pinson

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Call For Papers: GlobalSIP'15 Symposium on Signal and Information Processing for Optimizing Future Energy Systems

Posting this CFP per request of Dr. Hao Zhu.

GlobalSIP'15 Symposium on 

Signal and Information Processing for Optimizing Future Energy Systems

Orlando, Florida, USA, December 14-16, 2015

Mark Your 2015 Calendar: Tao's Recommended Conferences for Energy Forecasters

Update (3/1/2015): Due to high demand of my load forecasting courses, we added an offering at the New York City in May. 

Update (2/18/2015): I just confirmed two more speakers for ISF2015. Now we have six presentations in two sessions. 

Recently I received many inquiries about recommended energy forecasting conferences in 2015. First of all, I have never attended a conference that is perfectly designed and organized for energy forecasters, which motivates me to organize the ultimate energy forecasting conference. If you have to wait for this ultimate one, close this page and stay tuned for another two years. Otherwise, keep reading. I will provide a list of 6 venues for you to consider, in the chronological order.

1. Tao's load forecasting courses (May 27-29, 2015, New York, NY)

I have taught the fundamental course 15 times. More than 150 energy forecasters have attended the course. (See some statistics based on the first 10 offerings) Recently I have developed a one-day advanced level course for those who want some in depth coverage of the subject and hands on experience of SAS. The links to the courses are listed below:

• Electric Load Forecasting: Fundamentals and Best Practices
• Electric Load Forecasting: Advanced Topics and Case Studies

2. 35th International Symposium on Forecasting (ISF2015, June 21-24, 2015, Riverside, CA)

ISF2015 is a great conference if you want to learn the frontiers of forecasting. I'm organizing an energy forecasting session at ISF2015. The two sessions includes six talks with a balanced mix of state-of-the-art research and practice.

Session Title: Frontiers in Electricity Demand Forecasting I: The State of The Practice
Chair: Tao Hong (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA)

• SAS Energy Forecasting: Hourly load forecasting for all horizons
• Bradley Lawson (SAS, USA)
• Combining sister load forecasts
• Tao Hong (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA)
• Bidong Liu (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA)
• MEFM: An R package for long-term probabilistic forecasting of electricity demand
• Rob J. Hyndman (Monash University, Australia)

Session Title: Frontiers in Electricity Demand Forecasting II: Probabilistic Electric Load Forecasting
Chair: Tao Hong (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA)

• Quantile regression algorithms for forecasting uncertainty in electricity smart meters data
• Souhaib Ben Taieb, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia.
• Rob J. Hyndman, Monash University, Australia
• Marc G. Genton, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia.
• Electricity demand interval forecasting with Quantile Regression Averaging
• Jakub Notowarski (Wrocław University of Technology, Poland)
• The myths of residual simulation for probabilistic load forecasting 
• Jingrui Xie (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA)

3. 3rd International Conference Energy & Meteorology (ICEM2015, June 22-26, 2015, Denver, CO)

Weather drives electricity demand and wind/solar power generation. The conference has a unique focus on the interdisciplinary field of energy and meteorology. For more information, please read Make a Difference in the Energy & Meteorology World written by the guest blogger and conference chair Alberto Troccoli.

4. Modern Electric Power Systems Conference 2015 (MEPS2015, July 6-9, 2015, Wroclaw, Poland)

If you are in the area of load and price forecasting, you must be familiar with Rafal Weron and his book "Modeling and Forecasting Electricity Loads and Prices: A Statistical Approach" and the recent IJF open access paper "Electricity Price Forecasting: A Review of the State-of-the-art with a Look into the Future". Rafal is based in Wroclaw, Poland. He is also a key player on the organizing committee of MEPS2015. I'm sure he will present some nice forecasting work at the conference.

5. IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting 2015 (PESGM2015, July 26-30, 2015, Denver, CO)

We have organized two days of agenda on energy forecasting. A full-day tutorial on "Energy Forecasting in the Smart Grid Era", and a full-day session of GEFCom2014 finalist presentations. I will write another blog post when the schedule is finalized.

6. AEIC/WLRA annual conference (time & location TBD)

This is a joint conference organized by AEIC Load Research Committee and Western Load Research Association. The two groups used to organize conferences separately. Last year was the first time they held a joint conference. I hope they will continue the joint conference this fall.

Mark your calendar and enjoy the trips!

Make a difference in the Energy & Meteorology World!

Make a difference in the Energy & Meteorology World!

Guest Blogger: Dr. Alberto Troccoli

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia

I’ve always felt the urge to see my scientific research come out of the computer screen to land on a practical everyday situation. It is often much easier said than done however. As scientists we like to think our research is going to be used by someone one day, but the truth is that most of the time we prefer the comfort of the "ivory tower". We may feel a sense of relief when, in project proposals, we include the odd sentence about the critical role of our research for society, often added in an attempt to get our proposal across the line.

Oceanography, seasonal climate forecasts and more generally climate research has been a satisfying endeavor for me for many a year but the baby steps in this area of research, despite the size of the effort, had become less and less fulfilling. What a better time then to use weather and climate (collectively referred to as meteorology) observations and forecasts to directly assist society! And what better time to simultaneously assist society in the once-in-a-few-generation overhaul of the energy system! To contribute to the sustainability, resilience and efficiency of energy systems under ever changing weather and climate appeared (and it still does!) like a thrilling goal!

2014 AEIC Annual Load Research Conference and WLRA Fall Conference

The 2014 AEIC Annual Load Research Conference will be held in conjunction with the Western Load Research Association (WLRA) fall conference, on September 21-24, at the Hotel Monaco in Chicago, IL. This collaborative agenda between two premier Load Research groups will be a great forum to exchange ideas with other industry professionals.

I have been attending both conferences for several years. In the past, they were held separately. Usually there are about 30 to 40 people attending the conference. All of the talks are in one track, so you won't miss any talk that you are interested in. The attendees are primarily from utilities, vendors and consulting firms, so you can expect quite practical talks and learn from each other's real world experience. Hotel Monaco is a great place to host small conferences like this. Nice room, good food, and kids friendly in case you want to bring the family.

Dennis Kelter, lead load forecast manager for ComEd will kick off the event with a presentation "Welcome from ComEd". There are two forecasting talks currently scheduled:

• "The Art and Science of Reconciliation in Long Term Load Forecasting" - Tao Hong (UNC Charlotte)
• "Weather Normalization of Energy by Time of Use" - Rob Zacher (ComEd) and Stuart McMenamin (Itron)

Energy Forecasting Activities at PESGM2014

The 2014 IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting will be held in National Harbor, MD, July 27-31, 2014. Our working group again organized an exciting program on energy forecasting.

Energy Forecasting Activities at IEEE T&D2014

Energy forecasting plays a vital role in the planning and operation practices of the modern utilities. The IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting organized two panel sessions at the 2014 IEEE T&D Conference & Exposition, Chicago, IL, April 14-17, 2014. These two panel sessions bring together marketer operators and participants in North America to discuss today’s practices and challenges of integrating energy forecasts into energy market planning and operations. Both panel are scheduled on April 15th, 2014 in Room W185A. The early registration deadline is March 14th, 2014. The panel information is listed below: 

Energy Forecasting Activities at PESGM2013

As a fundamental problem in the utility industry, energy forecasting has applications across all sectors of the industry and most departments of a utility. I'm a big advocate of "understanding the business needs before developing the forecasts". In my earlier post, Three Skills of an Ideal Energy Forecaster, I put down "broad and deep understanding of utility business operations and needs" as the first skill. How to develop such a skill?