Identification of new forecasting products

Forecasting of renewable energy generation is a mature R&D area, also with a lot of operational experience and commercial offering. As the share of renewable energy generation in the energy mix increases, in parallel to a liberalization of electricity markets, new needs for forecasting have appeared. Throughout the last few decades, emphasis was placed on deterministic and probabilistic forecasting, extremes, ramps, etc. As of today, we argue that new developments and proposals for forecast products should happen within a problem-oriented approach: there, forecast products are at the interface between forecasters and forecast users, and driven by the decision problem at hand.

In this report, we review the current evolution in market, operations, etc. that call for new forecast products. We also look at new views coming from the R&D side, with the aim to introduce new forecast products and show their interest for forecast users. Eventually, we argue that, beyond forecast products only, there are also a number of new business models of relevance being developed, e.g. related to collaborative analytics and data markets.