2024 Shultz Energy Fellowships: California Independent System Operator (CAISO) - Market Analysis and Forecasting

Regional-, state-, and city-level efforts are essential in our fight against climate change, especially in the field of energy. Stanford University is committed to helping by integrating its students into energy and climate ecosystems in the West through the Shultz Energy Fellowships program, an energy-related summer fellowship program for undergraduate and graduate students.

Named in honor of former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, one of the most widely admired American public servants of the past half-century, the program offers a suite of paid, energy-related public service fellowships for Stanford students in Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawai'i, and Utah during the summer. 

You will be one of two Shultz Energy Fellows at CAISO; the other will be an undergraduate fellow in Resource Assessment and Planning. The fellowship runs from Monday, June 24, 2024 to Friday, August 30, 2024.

Organization/Agency mission or role in state government

The California Independent System Operator Corporation (ISO) is located in Folsom, California, and manages the flow of electricity across the high-voltage, long-distance power lines that make up over 80 percent of California’s electric power grid. The not-for-profit public benefit corporation safeguards the economy and well-being of over 30 million customers by "keeping the lights on” 24/7.

The ISO has one of the most modern electricity generation and delivery control centers in North America. It has been described as a hybrid of the New York Stock Exchange and NASA’s mission control and powers the world’s eighth largest economy—California. The ISO designed its control center with a clean, green world in mind by using the latest high-tech grid reliability and renewable resource integration tools. To deliver all that clean energy, the ISO employs advanced technologies to monitor the power grid in milliseconds to ensure the 26,000-mile transmission network and over 850 power plants are always ready to meet the electricity needs of people in California and in the six states that are members of the western Energy Imbalance Market.

As the nerve center for the power grid, the ISO matches buyers and sellers of electricity, facilitating over 28,000 market transactions every day to ensure enough power is on hand to meet demand. Every five minutes the ISO forecasts electrical demand, accounts for operating reserves and dispatches the lowest cost power plant unit to meet demand while ensuring enough transmission capacity is available to deliver the power.

The ISO is the only system operator in the western United States supported by a competitive auction-style electricity market. The California ISO is the hub of efforts underway at state and government agencies and research laboratories to advance grid and system technologies, policies and processes because the ISO must use innovations to reliably operate the grid at all times and identify and dispatch the most cost efficient power to meet demand. The ISO is leading the way to tomorrow’s energy network through the following strategies:

• Lead the transition to renewable energy;
• Maintain reliability during industry transformation; and
• Expand regional collaboration to unlock mutual benefits.

The ISO is leading the world in the development of policies to effectively integrate large amounts of variable output renewable generation into the wholesale grid. The ISO is also leading the development of policies that enable distribution system resources, such as demand response, rooftop solar, and energy storage to participate in the ISO’s wholesale market. This will, for the first time, empower consumers to have the ability to become energy suppliers as well.

The ISO is regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and complies with standards set by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the Western Electricity Coordinating Council.

Potential Projects

In the Market Design and Analysis Division, the fellow will support the ISO’s efforts in assessing the market efficiency of different design features implemented in the ISO’s markets to reliably operate the electric grid. A successful experience will include learning about the core design of the ISO’s markets, learning analytics techniques to assess these features, and developing off-line simulations models to counterfactually analyze different design scenarios.

The California ISO is looking to host a student who is passionate about shaping the future of the California ISO’s electricity market through engineering and economic analysis. To be successful, the student should have strong data science skills, R/Phyton programming skills as well as background in optimization techniques.

The Project will include two parts:

• Development of an off-line market clearing model: Develop an R/Phyton simulation tool to analyze different design concepts of the ISO’s market. This requires  programming an optimization tool that models the main features of the ISO system including, generation resources, demand bids, renewable resources, system constraints and different market products such as energy and ramping capacity.
• Application of machine learning techniques to market analytics. Apply machine learning techniques to analysis used to assess the efficiency and quality of the ISO ‘s market. Most of the techniques to assess the market performance are based on classical analytics techniques. This part of the projects is to expand the horizon and determine feasibility of using machine-learning solutions.

Potential Mentor

• Guillermo Bautista Alderete, PhD, Director, Market Analysis and Forecasting

2023 Fellows

• Gabriel Reygrobellet, MS '24, Civil & Environmental Engineering
• Chloé Romero, Earth Systems ‘25
• Learn more about their experiences at CAISO:
  • Gabriel’s blog post
  • Chloé’s blog post
  • Final projects