OmegaLambdaTec’s Energy Cost Analyser, Forecaster and Simulator (ecostar3) is a web application designed to help utility companies tracking current and past energy costs and estimating their budget needs for the following months. It consists of three main modules:
1) An accounting tool, which will enable monitoring of the energy bills by automatically estimating the costs of used energy. The main purpose of this module is to allow users to verify that the issued bills match the actual cost of the used energy.
2) A modelling/forecasting tool, which will allow to estimate the energy consumption and price with different time horizons (e.g. 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 month, etc.), and including carefully-estimated uncertainties. By combining estimations of future consumption and price, the expected costs for the following months can be determined.
3) A scenario-simulator tool, based on the results of the modelling/forecasting tool. This will provide an estimate of the costs in the following months under different conditions. This can be used, for example, to define the budget that might be necessary to allocate in a high-risk scenario.
Usage of Standards for data interoperability:
Standards for data interoperability in the energy sector are currently a hot topic for European agencies, but no final decision has been taken yet. Our solution is based on algorithms that are agnostic with respect to the data format. The data will be provided by the partner utilities through secured exchange platform, and therefore our solution will conform to whatever future defined standard for data interoperability in the energy sector.