Use of Forecast Uncertainties in the Power Sector: State-of-the-Art of Business Practices

The work we present is an investigation on the state-of-the-art use of forecast uncertainties in the business practices of actors in the power systems sector that is part of the “IEA Wind Task 36: Wind Power Forecasting”. The purpose of this task is to get an overview of the current use and application of probabilistic forecasts by actors in the power industry and investigate how they estimate and deal with uncertainties. The authors with expertise in probabilistic forecasting have been gathering information from the industry in order to identify the areas, where progress is needed and where it is difficult to achieve further progress. For this purpose, interview questions were compiled for different branches in the power industry and interviews carried out all around the world in the first six months of 2016. At this stage, we present and discuss results from this first round of interviews and draw preliminary conclusions outlining gaps in current forecasting methodologies and their use in the industry. At the end we provide some recommendations for next steps and further development with the objective to formulate guidelines for the use of uncertainty forecasts in the power market at a later stage.