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Western Power Distribution (WPD) has launched a series of data science competitions to support the transition to net zero by identifying, analysing and solving industry-wide problems.
The Data Science Challenge, which is open to anyone, is being run in collaboration with the Energy Systems Catapult and builds on the success of an earlier science challenge that formed part of WPD’s Presumed Open Data innovation project.
“The level of interest in our first data science challenge was so incredible we knew we had to keep them going and make them a regular feature as part of our data and digitalisation programme,” said WPD’s data and digitalisation manager Jonathan Berry.
“Making our data open is all about using it to add value and benefit to our customers and stakeholders and we know this is a great way to get people involved from all over the world to test the ‘art of the possible’ with our data at the centre.”
The first challenge will investigate the loss of estimation accuracy when reducing the temporal resolution of demand data. WPD said collecting and analysing high-resolution data requires more storage and computational power, inflating costs.
The challenge will seek to establish whether high-resolution features – in this case, extremes of demand – can be estimated using lower resolution data, weather data and limited samples of high-resolution historical data. The ultimate aim is to use multiple data streams, including smart meter data, and machine learning to minimise the required level of physical monitoring of the electricity network.
Berry added: “This and all our challenges will be open to everyone, whether an experienced data scientist, a student, someone who is just interested in picking up data science and using the challenge to target their development – we’re keen to create an enthusiastic and inclusive energy data community.
“We have already made lots of our data open, through our Connected Data Portal, and we will continue to increase this. We’re looking forward to seeing how a collaborative community of data scientists and energy enthusiasts will use our data to answer some of the toughest questions the industry faces as we move to delivering net zero effectively.”
The first challenge will begin on 11 November and end on 1 December, with the winners being announced on 8 December.
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