Dr. Monforte’s Retirement Brown Bag: The Past, Present and Future of Operational Load Forecasting
November 25, 2024
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I have had the pleasure of working with Dr. Frank A. Monforte for over 33 years. He was instrumental in starting and sustaining Itron’s successful forecasting brown bag webinars. We've been conducting these free, educational webinars since 2006! During the last 18 years, Itron has hosted 100 webinars. If you’re a forecaster, I'm sure you’ve run across one or more of the many brown bags, articles or white papers that Dr. Monforte has presented and authored—and this is one you won’t want to miss! Join our 101st special brown bag webinar on Tuesday, Dec. 10 at noon Pacific to wrap up 2024 and celebrate Frank’s retirement. He will discuss the past, current and future of operational load forecasting.
Over the past 45 years, Dr. Monforte has experienced advances in computing power from HP calculators to today’s mass computing data centers. Despite the lighting fast evolution of computing power and its promise of untethered computer intelligence, the “art” of operational load forecasting remains in the hands of a small cadre of talented professionals. To understand the daunting task that lies ahead, it is important to understand the path that has led us to today. The power industry faces a “fork in the road” as mass deployment of unmetered generation, storage and load control obscures true demand for power resulting in a chaotic measurement of load. The way forward depends on whether operational load forecasters can accurately account for behind-the-meter activity. If not, then traditional operational load forecast models and methods that were developed based on a deep understanding of the factors that drive demand for power will start to fail and the industry will be forced to adapt to load forecasts that are increasingly fraught with error. The alternative fork embraces the increasing load volatility leading to system operations and operational forecasting frameworks that work within the bounds of an ever-widening chaotic load series.
If you registered for any of the 2024 Itron Forecasting brown bags, you will automatically receive the log in instructions for this presentation. If you haven’t, register today.
Paige Schaefer is a Product Marketing Manager in Itron’s Outcomes group for the strategy, planning and implementation of projects supporting marketing functions spanning electricity, water and gas business units. She interacts directly with sales, product and corporate marketing to identify new marketing opportunities, recommend actions and the coordination of targeted campaigns to increase brand awareness and market share where she works closely with the teams to develop content and strategies. In addition, she provides website support, event coordination and manages Itron’s Energy Forecasting Group (EFG), which supports end-use data development, the Statistical End-use Approach (SAE) and coordinates their annual meeting for discussing modeling and forecasting issues. Paige has a B.S. in Business Administration from San Diego State University with an emphasis in Marketing.
