Abstract:

It gets cold in Milwaukee. As I write this, it is -9 F, with wind chills -25 to -30. Natural gas for heating takes 2 - 3 days to get here from Oklahoma or Louisiana. If our local utility does not order enough, they buy it on the spot market at premium prices. If they order too much, the pipeline companies charge them penalties.

The GasDay lab at Marquette University licenses to local natural gas utilities software to forecast the gas demands of their customers hours, days, and months in the future. We license to 14 utilities across the US. In the 2005-06 heating season, we helped forecast 20% of the gas used by residential, commercial, and industrial customers in the US. We also offer analysis consulting services including peak day studies and data cleaning.

We will discuss some of the mathematical modeling challenges, as well as the entrepreneurial challenges of running a $300K small business with students within the university.