LF Energy Summit Europe 2026

For reliable and cost-efficient distribution grid operation and redispatch management, accurate short-term forecasting is a core prerequisite. At E.ON, we originally relied on vendor-built “black box” forecasting solutions and experienced the familiar trade-offs: slow iteration cycles, limited transparency, and dependence on external roadmaps. In this talk, I’ll share our journey to an open-source target picture for transformer load forecasting in a redispatch context. After a quick intro to the redispatch problem and our system setup, I’ll walk through our OpenSTEF-based approach. I’ll then present results from a real benchmark against an external model and the practical lessons learned; what mattered, what didn’t, and where open source helped us move faster. Finally, I’ll cover the organizational path: how we navigated compliance and governance with our Open Source Office to turn from user into contributor.