Aug 18 2014
IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, today announced the start of the Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2014 (GEFCom2014)—sponsored by the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) and organized by the IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting.
“The Global Energy Forecasting Competition invites data scientists from around the globe to tackle the forecasting challenges that the power and energy industry faces today,” said Dr. Tao Hong, general chair of GEFCom2014, founding chair of the IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting and EPIC assistant professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “We have developed a cutting-edge forecasting competition platform on CrowdANALYTIX.com. It’s now officially open to entries from interested teams. We have also created a LinkedIn group to connect the contestants and facilitate discussions during the competition.”
GEFCom2014 will end on Dec. 15, 2014. In addition, winning teams and institutions of the competition will be invited to present their methodologies and insights at the 2015 IEEE PES General Meeting in Denver.
Since its inception in 2012, the competition has set the mission to help improve the forecasting practices of the utility industry; bring together state-of-the-art techniques for energy forecasting; bridge the gap between academic research and industry practice; promote analytics in power and energy education; and prepare the industry to overcome the forecasting challenges posed by the smart grid world.
GEFCom2014 is the first forecasting competition in the power and energy industry that asks for probabilistic forecasts. For each step throughout the forecasting horizon, the contestants are required to submit 99 forecasted quantiles instead of a single point estimate.
“In today’s competitive and dynamic environments, more and more decision-making processes in the power and energy industry rely on probabilistic forecasts to properly manage the risk introduced by active demand, intermittent energy resources and severe weather conditions,” said Hong. “Findings from this competition will greatly benefit several emerging areas, such as renewable integration and demand response.”
The four tracks in GEFCom2014 include electric load forecasting, wind power forecasting, solar power forecasting and electricity price forecasting. Up to three teams from each track will be recognized as winners. GEFCom2014 will also recognize the non-profit institutions that have multiple well-performing teams.
For more information about GEFCom2014, please visit http://www.gefcom.org.
To learn more about IEEE PES, visit us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ieeepes, follow us on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ieee_pes, connect with us on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/groups/IEEE-Power-Energy-Society-3792736.