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Effectively integrating renewable energy sources into electricity markets is essential to aligning real-time supply with demand and reducing revenue losses from curtailment. Storage technologies offer an effective means to overcome this issue by boosting grid reliability and operational efficiency, while also enhancing market liquidity and dampening price fluctuations. In short-term electricity markets, participants face a wide range of choices, each with distinct risks and benefits, and well-designed trading strategies are crucial for profit maximization. This research investigates the optimization of trading activities in the day-ahead and balancing markets of the Irish electricity system over the period 2019–2022, using quantile-based forecasting techniques. By applying three trading strategies subject to realistic operational constraints, the study assesses different approaches, raises trading frequency, and incorporates flexible timestamp-based orders. The results highlight substantial profit opportunities from concurrent participation in both day-ahead and balancing markets, particularly with larger battery storage capacities. Even though higher trading volumes entail greater costs and compressed profit margins, the adoption of adaptive dual-market strategies proves instrumental in maximizing returns and overcoming market-specific obstacles. Lastly, a scenario-based analysis assesses the economic feasibility of four commercial battery storage systems, demonstrating that larger battery units deliver shorter payback periods. 

With the rise of the Smart Home sector and the growing adoption of Machine Learning (ML), the acquisition of power consumption data is becoming increasingly significant. Gathering real-world energy measurements using sensors is often time-intensive, costly, error-prone, and, in some cases, entirely infeasible. To address this, we introduce the VA-Creator, a framework designed for generating Virtual Appliances (VAs). These VAs produce synthetic power consumption patterns (PCPs) using Neural Networks (NNs) that dynamically adjust their architecture according to the structure of the training data, thereby facilitating the development of additional VAs. To cover every appliance category commonly found in a typical household, we employ a range of neural network types—including Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs), Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs), and a tailored Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)—alongside other ML approaches such as XGBoost, choosing the most suitable method based on the specific properties of each appliance. The outputs of these ML models are subsequently compared with actual measurements and evaluated using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and MLP-based discriminator classification accuracy as evaluation metrics. Furthermore, to verify that the VAs enable effective training of ML models, we generate synthetic datasets with them and conduct an in-depth evaluation by training Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) models. The results of this comprehensive assessment confirm that the VA models yield realistic and practically useful outputs.

The swift expansion of electric vehicle adoption demands significant improvements in durability, safety, and dependability for advanced high-capacity battery systems. Consequently, there is a strong need for data-oriented battery management strategies capable of decoding intricate battery signals and guiding appropriate control of the coupled multi-physical processes inside batteries. At present, battery informatics is gaining traction as an effective strategy, harnessing sophisticated machine learning methods to generate reliable forecasts of battery capability, degradation state, and hazard levels—yet its advancement is severely constrained by insufficient data availability. In response, this work offers one of the pioneering contributions to synthetic and experimental data creation, integrating lab-based measurements with comprehensive three-dimensional (3-D) multi-physics simulations to establish a robust deep learning pipeline accompanied by detailed evaluation of performance metrics and thermal hazard anticipation. In particular, Part I addresses the construction and rigorous verification of the battery simulation framework, conducted in two main phases to confirm its predictive fidelity: initially, validation of the multi-physics approach was performed using measurements from two widely used commercial Li-ion cells—Panasonic NCR18650B and 18650BD; subsequently, an in-depth investigation of the thermal–electrochemical coupling was carried out, yielding valuable model-derived understanding such as temporal voltage profiles and identification of peak local temperature regions (hot spots). This carefully validated model produces high-quality, interpretable datasets suitable for training the hybrid convolutional neural network and long short-term memory architecture (CNN-LSTM), which will be detailed in Part II.

A wide range of strategies has been proposed to identify and prevent non-technical electricity losses resulting from fraudulent activities. Among these, machine learning algorithms and data-driven methods have become increasingly prominent compared to conventional approaches, owing to their superior performance, leading to growing adoption in recent years. This paper introduces a novel two-step method for detecting fraudulent Non-technical losses (NTLs) in smart grids. The initial step is to transform the time-series data by incorporating additional features extracted from the publicly available State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) dataset. These features are derived following the detection of sudden changes in electricity consumption patterns, using the sum of finite differences, the Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average model, and the Holt-Winters model. Subsequently, five classification models are applied to train and evaluate a fraud detection system using the SGCC dataset. The performance evaluation shows that the Gradient Boosting Machine delivers the best results among the five models. This two-step procedure enables classification models to outperform previously reported top-performing techniques in terms of accuracy, F1-score, and other key metrics for non-technical loss detection.