Hybrid Energy Forecasting and Trading Competition

There are two tracks: forecasting and trading. Participants are encouraged to compete in both tracks, and an additional prize is on offer for combined performance across forecasting and trading. Submissions to both traks must be made by 9:20AM UTC on each day of the competition period.

The forecasting track requires participants to produce probabilistic forecasts of the power production from a hybrid power plant comprising the Hornsea 1 wind farm and the combined solar capacity of East England, totalling approximately 3.6GW. Forecasts in the form of quantiles from 10% to 90% in increments of 10% are required for each half-hour period of the day-ahead. Forecasts will be scored using the Pinball Loss.

The trading track requires participants to trade the energy produced from the hybrid power plant in the day-ahead electricity market. This track is based on Great Britain’s wholesale electricity market, which features a day-ahead auction and single-price imbalance settlement.

Key Dates:

Following an unexpected reduction in the export capacity from Hornsea 1 wind farm, the competition start and proceeding dates have been revised to give participants time to adapt to the new situation. The export limitation at Hornsea 1 is expected to end on 17 February, however, the competition start will not be pushed back any further. Participant should consider any potential reduction capacity in their submissions. Data on capacity reductions is available via REMIT (see FAQs in the documentation).

Registration will be open from 1 November 2023 to 26 January 2024.

1 November 2023: Competition platform opens for development and testing

19 February 2024: First submission of the competition period (forecasts and bids for 20 February 2024)

18 May 2024: Last submission of the competition period (forecasts and bids for 19 May 2024)

24 May 2024: Deadline to respond to participant survey

31 May 2024: Announcement of final leaderboard and prizes

Scoring and Prizes:

A live scoreboard will be maintained on the competition website. This will display team name and their score in each track. The scoreboards will be updated as data become available, which is typically with a lag of seven days.

During the test and competition period, a scoreboard displaying scores for the most recent full week of evaluation data will be displayed. During the competition period, scores will be displayed covering the period from the start of the competition to the most recent evaluation data.

The following cash prizes will be awarded:

A team’s score in the “Combined Ranking” category will be the sum or ranks from the Energy Trading and Forecasting tracks. Ties will be broken based on ranking in the Forecasting track. A student team finishing in the top three may claim the main prize and the prize for the placed student team.

All prize-winning teams will be invited to submit a paper describing their approach to the International Journal of Forecasting (which must be fully reproducible). Furthermore, the top three teams* and best placed student team** will be invited to:

1. present their approaches at the International Symposium on Forecasting, which will take place 30 June to 3 July 2024 in Dijon, France. ISF is a fantastic conference attended by forecasting researchers and practitioners from around the world. HEFTcom has been given a special session at this conference, and financial support of $1000 per team is available to assist with travel and registration fees.
2. present at Ørsted’s internal Science Talks seminar series in September 2024 (online), which will include the opportunity to interact with forecasters and traders at Ørsted.

*1^st place in each track, or next best placed team if a team places 1^st in multiple tracks, with preference going to the combined ranking track, followed by trading track, followed by forecasting track.

**Best placed student team in the combined ranking track

Getting Started & Open Benchmark:

The organisers have provided an open-source benchmark which will serve as a reference for performance in the competition and as a quick start tool to aid teams in their participation. See this GitHub repository and attached documentation for details.

For competition networking, team formation and support using the competition API, you are welcome to join the Rebase Community Slack channel through this link.

Competition Rules:

Teams: You may participate as an individual or team. There is no limit on the size of teams. Only one registration is required per team.

Student Teams: All members of student teams must be registered full-time students (or part-time but not working in the energy industry) for the duration of the competition period to claim a student prize. The competition organises will verify student status as part of the registration process.

Data: rebase.energy have provided convenient APIs for most of the data you will need. However, there is no restriction on the use of additional data. Additional open data sources are suggested in documentation.

Missed submissions: A team may miss up to five submissions during the competition period. Missing entries will be filled by the Open Benchmark and scored accordingly.

Public dissemination of entries: by participating, teams grant the competition organisers the right to publicly disseminate any submitted data (bids and forecasts) after the end of the competition period. This is to enable reproducibility of the results table and further analysis.

Reports: To retain a position in the final leaderboard and to qualify for a prize, participants must respond to a survey that will include providing a high-level description of their methodology and any additional data used by 24 May 2024. A high-level summary of participants’ methodologies will be published after the competition.

Competition back-end: Only staff at rebase.energy will have access to the back-end of the competition platform (submission data, scoring algorithm, leaderboard etc) until the end of the competition period. Participants affiliated with rebase.energy or Ørsted are not eligible to claim prizes.

The organisers reserve the right to disqualify teams deemed to have broken rules or undermined the spirit of the competition, and to update the competition rules if necessary.

Notices:

This dataset contains BSC information licensed under the BSC Open Data Licence, the Open Government Licence and data from Sheffield Solar PV Live (Terms). See attached documentation for details.

Final Leaderboard:

The prize winning teams are:

• SVK: Jon Olauson, Olle Viotti and Jakob Huss (Svenska kraftnät)
• Rnt: Harisankar Haridas and Tarun Raj (REint.ai)
• UI BUD: Gergo Barta (Vestas Wind Systems)
• GEB (student team): Chuanqing Pu, Songyuan Liu, Jinming Yu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)