Richard Bean

Data Scientist · Energy Market Analyst · Mathematician

I am a data scientist and energy market analyst based in Newcastle, New South Wales, with 25 years' experience across academia, government and industry. My research covers energy forecasting, transport analytics, combinatorics and classical cryptography.

I am currently Senior Energy Market Analyst at Energy Exemplar, building models of the Western Australian, Northern Territory and National Electricity Market (NEM) power systems in PLEXOS, a commercial electricity-market simulation platform. I remain an Affiliate of the University of Queensland Cyber Research Centre and of the University of Newcastle. In the IEEE-CIS Predict+Optimize international energy forecasting competition for the Monash Microgrid (49 entrants) I won the Forecasting Prize for the most accurate forecasts and placed second overall.

Curriculum vitae

Selected work

Energy forecasting and optimisationForecasting Prize winner and second overall, IEEE-CIS Predict+Optimize Technical Challenge (2021). Inspect the R and Python code.

Classical cryptographySolved the Biafran-war transposition telexes, the Dee alchemical notebook cipher, the last unsolved 1920s IRA cipher, Thouless's life-after-death test and the CIA Museum's Coded Ceiling cipher; set new Playfair records.

Transport analyticsWeather, hills and gender in 40+ cities' public bike-share schemes.

CombinatoricsLatin squares, critical sets and trades: PhD and continuing work.

Media coverage analysisCounting who gets interviewed, how they are questioned and what language is used in Australian news coverage, with Ette Media and in Pearls and Irritations.

Technical expertise

Energy systems: PLEXOS market modelling, electricity demand and solar forecasting, battery scheduling and virtual power plants.
Data science: R, Python, SQL and C/C++; time-series analysis, clustering, statistical modelling and data quality.
Optimisation: Gurobi, constrained scheduling and combinatorial search.
Communication: client advice, government reports, university teaching and public explanations of technical research.

Research profiles

Contact

For professional opportunities and research enquiries, email cv-2026@richardbean.id.au or connect on LinkedIn.

Consulting

I take on a limited number of independent consulting projects (data science, forecasting, optimisation and applied research) through my consultancy Catalyst Calculations (ABN 83 327 588 681). Enquiries are welcome at catcalc.com.au.