Second International Workshop
on Energy Data and Analytics

e-Energy Workshop 2019
June 25, 2019 – Phoenix, AZ, United States

Important Dates

Paper Registration and Submission: ~~February 26, 2019~~ March 5, 2019
Notification of Acceptance: April 15, 2019
Final Manuscript Due: May 20, 2019

Keynote Speaker

David Irwin, University of Massachusetts Amherst

“Staring at the Sun: Black-box Solar Energy Analytics and their Privacy Implications”

Bio & Abstract

Abstract

The penetration of solar energy in the grid is rising rapidly due to continuing declines in solar module prices. However, large-scale solar penetration imposes an increasing burden on the grid to absorb a consumers' solar energy surpluses and make up for their energy deficits. The energy produced by solar deployments is often monitored directly or indirectly by utilities and third parties using networked energy meters, which record and transmit energy data at fine-grained intervals. While this solar energy data is a rich source of information that can improve grid operations, it also has serious privacy implications. In this talk, we will present some recent work on solar energy analytics that illustrates this dichotomy. We first present SunDance, a technique for disaggregating solar power from a building's net energy usage. Since the vast majority of solar deployments are "behind the meter," accurate solar disaggregation can significantly improve utilities' visibility into distributed solar generation. Unfortunately, solar energy data is not anonymous: since every location on Earth has a unique solar signature, it embeds detailed location information. To explore the severity and extent of this privacy threat, we next discuss SunSpot and Weatherman, techniques for localizing "anonymous" solar-powered buildings based on each location's unique solar and weather signature, respectively.

Bio

David Irwin is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he leads the Sustainable Computing Lab. His research focuses on designing, building, and analyzing experimental software systems with a particular emphasis on improving sustainability. This research cuts across multiple areas, including operating systems and virtualization, distributed systems and networking, embedded sensor systems, data science, security and privacy, and economics. He has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal, conference, and workshop publications, and is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award and multiple Google Faculty Research awards. In addition, work that formed the basis of his Ph.D. dissertation was selected as one of the best papers in the first 20 years of the ACM HPDC conference. This 2003 paper was one of the first on the design of what are now known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds, which are the foundation of cloud computing. In 2018, the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst awarded him the Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.

Schedule

Presentations of papers are 20 minutes long with 5 minutes discussion. Presentations for short papers are 12 minutes long with 3 minutes discussion.

9:00–11:00 — Data-Driven Design of Energy Systems

Invited Talk — “Staring at the Sun: Black-box Solar Energy Analytics and their Privacy Implications”

David Irwin, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Energy Time-Series Features for Emerging Applications on the Basis of Human-Readable Machine Descriptions
(long)

Michael Vollmer, Holger Trittenbach, Shahab Karrari, Adrian Englhardt, Pawel Bielski, Klemens Böhm (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Towards Improved Real-Time Observability of Behind-Meter PhotoVoltaic Systems: A Data-Driven Approach
(long)

Chung Ming Cheung, Sanmukh Rao Kuppannagar (University of Southern California), Rajgopal Kannan (US ARL-West), Viktor K. Prasanna (University of Southern California)
The Effect of Aggregation on Battery Sizing for Peak Shaving
(short)

Dominik Werle, Simon Bischof, Holger Trittenbach, Daniel Warzel, Anne Koziolek, Klemens Böhm (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

11:20–12:30 — Data Sets

Industrial Demand-Side Flexibility: A Benchmark Data Set
(long)

Nicole Ludwig, Lukas Barth, Dorothea Wagner, Veit Hagenmeyer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
FOBSS: Monitoring Data from a Modular Battery System
(short)

Georg Steinbuß, Benedikt Rzepka, Simon Bischof, Thomas Blank, Klemens Böhm (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Transmission Grid Congestion Data and Directions for Future Research
(short)

Benjamin Rausch, Philipp Staudt, Christof Weinhardt (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
The NextGen Energy Storage trial in the ACT, Australia
(short)

Marnie Shaw, Bjorn Sturmberg, Lin Guo, Xinyu Gao, Elizabeth Ratnam, Lachlan Blackhall (The Australian National University)

Scope and Topics

The design of future energy systems that are efficient, ecologically friendly, robust and scalable is a core concern of our societies. Another very relevant development in recent years is the one towards a data-driven perspective on system design. In the context of energy systems, a broad variety of data, often huge in volume, is available. For instance, each smart meter is generating data streams, which often are recorded and archived. The questions how such data can be captured and processed, and what can be learned from it are fundamentally important. This includes predictions of various kinds of supply and demand, predictive maintenance of energy infrastructures, the processing of energy-consumption data in a way that respects the privacy of the individuals involved as well as business secrets etc.

This workshop is interdisciplinary in nature, i.e., brings together individuals interested in both data management/data analytics and energy systems. Its objectives are the following ones:

The workshop wants to draw attention to the fact that data-driven approaches often are possible and tend to be promising when designing and operating energy systems.
The workshop wants to give researchers in databases/KDD communities the opportunity to subject their ideas, concepts and solutions to a critical perspective by experts for energy systems.
The workshop wants to help bringing researchers on energy systems close to the state-of-the-art on what data-oriented approaches can do for the design and operation of such systems. It wants to provide support to individuals who want to broaden up methodologically.
The workshop wants to serve as a networking platform, with an eye on funding opportunities in particular.
The workshop aims to expose researchers to a diverse audience eager to learn about novel data sets, which relate to emerging research topics in particular.

The workshop solicits submissions on the following topics – all of them specific to energy data/energy systems and their characteristics:

New approaches and techniques to analyze energy data
data reduction
data science for energy data
infrastructures for/techniques/best principles for the administration, management and archiving of energy data
data from simulations of energy systems
synthetic data generation
visualization
data integration and data quality
data privacy and anonymization
modeling and representing energy-specific knowledge

On a methodological level, the workshop is open to any kind of submission:

research papers
vision papers
comparative studies
descriptors of energy data sets
case studies and experience reports.

Submission Guidelines

Two types of contributions are solicited:

Full papers, up to 8 pages in 9-point ACM double-column format (i.e., excluding references) and unlimited number of pages for appendices and references, single-blind.
Short papers, up to 4 pages in 9-point ACM double-column format (i.e., excluding references) and unlimited number of pages for appendices and references, single-blind.

The submission must be in PDF format and be formatted according to the official ACM Proceedings format. Papers that do not meet the size and formatting requirements may not be reviewed. Word and LaTeX templates are available at http://www.acm.org/publications/article-templates/proceedings-template.html. The proceedings of the workshop will be published by ACM Digital Library along with the e-Energy conference proceedings.

Submissions are made by HotCRP: https://eenergy19eda.hotcrp.com/