We need to talk about Low Voltage - Low Voltage Load Forecasting: Methods, Applications and Recommendations

The increased digitalisation and monitoring of the energy system opens up numerous opportunities to decarbonise the energy system. Applications on low voltage, local networks, such as community energy markets and smart storage will facilitate decarbonisation, but they will require advanced control and management. Reliable forecasting will be a necessary component of many of these systems to anticipate key features and uncertainties. Despite this urgent need, there has not yet been an extensive investigation into the current state-of-the-art of low voltage level forecasts, other than at the smart meter level. In this talk we want to go over main challenges, current approaches and core applications of low voltage load forecasting based on our recent review https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.00006v1.pdf. While there is no silver bullet (or the state-of-the-art method), we overview the most promising methodologies for prominent applications, review the trends, gaps and  future directions. We also want to invite researchers to use and contribute to the compiled list of open datasets https://low-voltage-loadforecasting.github.io/ and to go over what we can do better as researchers and practitioners to advance research in this  important area.