Load Forecasting: the State of the Practice

Load forecasting is vital to planning and operations of the power systems. While thousands of papers on load forecasting are being published every year, most are far away from real-world practice. To continue advancing the field, it is important for the scholars to understand why utilities do business the way they are doing today. This session brings together 6 seasoned practitioners from 4 countries to share with the audience their experiences on various aspects of load forecasting. It covers virtually all of the load forecasting problems, from short, medium and long term forecasting to spatial load forecasting. It also covers the load forecasting processes, such as data issues and combination of multiple vendors? fore- casts. This panel is formulated by the case studies with diverse organizational backgrounds, which include a developing country, a largest utility in the world, two system operators and two cooperatives.