Towards data markets in renewable energy forecasting

Geographically distributed wind turbines, photovoltaic panels and sensors (e.g., pyranometers) produce large volumes of data that can be used to improve renewable energy sources (RES) forecasting skill. However, data owners may be unwilling to share their data, even if privacy is ensured, due to a form of prisoner's dilemma: all could benefit from data sharing, but in practice no one is willing to do do. Our proposal hence consists of a data marketplace, to incentivize collaboration between different data owners through the monetization of data. We adapt here an existing auction mechanism to the case of RES forecasting data. It accommodates the temporal nature of the data, i.e., lagged time-series act as covariates and models are updated continuously using a sliding window. A test case with wind energy data is presented to illustrate and assess the effectiveness of such data markets. All agents (or data owners) are shown to benefit in terms of higher revenue resulting from the combination of electricity and data markets. The results support the idea that data markets can be a viable solution to promote data exchange between RES agents and contribute to reducing system imbalance costs.