It's a couple of weeks since the IEEE Power & Energy Society's General Meeting, and I thought it was worth highlighting some of the society's forecasting activities. IEEE PES co-sponsors a number of IEEE journals that frequently publish energy forecasting research, such as Trans. Power Systems, Smart Grid and Sustainable Energy, they also sponsor the the Global Energy Forecasting Competition along with the International Institute of Forecasters.

At this year's general meeting there was a large range of forecasting activities lead by experts in various aspects of energy forecasting beginning with a whole-day tutorial on the Sunday before the main conference. Introductory lectures were given by Dr Tao Hong, Dr Shu Fan and Prof Hamidreza Zareipour on load, price, wind and solar power forecasting to a diverse audience of both forecasters and forecast users for both industry and academia. During the conference proper almost every session seemed to include a few posters on one aspect of energy forecasting or another! While the quality of papers varied the number of contributions from, or sponsored by, industry is evidence of the important role forecasting plays in modern power systems. All papers should be available on IEEE Xplore shortly.

The highlight of the week for me was the day of presentations by winners of the 2014 Global Energy Forecasting Competition. Many of the top performing entrants in all four competition tracks were present to discuss their work and receive their prizes. The winning entries will be published in a forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Forecasting. Something that I had under-appreciated before the meeting was the strength of the machine learning community in the energy forecasting space: many of the top performing entrants were not energy experts or pure statisticians but computer scientists.

The annual Futurewind seminar provides a stage for wind CDT students to present their work to guests from both academia and industry. This year the seminar was opened by Ignacio Marti (ORE Catapult and IEA Wind), a fellow forecaster. Despite a slowdown in investment in wind over the last couple of years, Ignacio gave an optimistic presentation highlighting the success of countries such as Spain, Denmark and Germany. He highlighted success of research efforts, for example how in the 90s 20% penetration was thought to be the maximum at which a power system could safely operate, and how now Spain and Denmark safely operate with over 70% instantaneous penetration.

Following presentations form PhD students, a panel made up of academics and industry representatives discussed the wind industry's prospects following the general election this May. The consensus was that prolonged uncertainty is holding up investment in renewables while other technologies are being pushed. When asked about the possibility of a referendum on membership of the EU, the importance of European targets and initiatives in driving the industry in the UK was highlighted.

The day was closed with the award of the poster prize to Alice Malvaldi (another forecaster!), and remarks from Prof David Infield, manager of the wind CDT.