UNC Charlotte Engineering Students Win Top Spots at Energy Forecasting Competition

Lee College of Engineering students Bhav Sardana and Vinayak Sharma, who are associated with UNC Charlotte’s Energy Informatics and Blockchain Technology Laboratory (E-IB Lab), secured the top two spots at this year’s NPower Energy Forecasting Challenge.

RWE NPower, a leading UK-based utility, has been organizing the energy forecasting challenge since 2015. This year’s challenge was to forecast natural gas consumption for an unspecified location in the Mid Westland, UK. Around 18 teams / data scientists from all over the world participated in the competition. The task consisted of three rounds, with each round consisting of six months ahead forecasts with six hours resolution.

The E-IB Lab, which is directed by Dr. Umit Cali, offers UNC Charlotte students various research opportunities in the fields of energy informatics and blockchain technology. For the competition, the E-IB Lab team, which included Sardana, Sharma and Dishant Banga, used stand-alone and hybrid cutting-edge data analytics and machine learning techniques to generate the best energy forecasting results.

More information about the competition is on the official web site.