Elijah Schacter's Summer at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO)

Elijah Schacter, Economics, '25
Bill Lane Center Intern & Shultz Energy Fellow, California Independent System Operator

During his summer at CAISO, Elijah Schacter is rethinking how demand response resources contribute to the California electricity grid.

I wanted this internship at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) to learn exactly how a competitive energy market is run, and to have access to a large database to apply all the analysis skills that I have acquired over the past year. 

The main project I have been working on is analyzing how effective and reliable demand response resources are. These resources are programs that incentivize businesses or residential customers to reduce electricity usage in tight supply conditions. However, there are many concerns about their reliability during emergency conditions and I have been trying to find ways to solve these reliability issues.

To perform the analysis, I have been using the dispatch and meter data of all the demand response resources that participated in the CAISO energy market for the past four years. Shockingly, the most difficult part of the work so far has been navigating the databases rather than doing the data analysis. While the analysis is straightforward (looking at mean, variance, and ratios) the CAISO database is massive, and Samuel Hawkes (the team's programmer) has been super helpful to me.

I have now completed the majority of my analysis on demand response resource performance over the past four years. Using the simple aggregation methods that I created, my team at CAISO will apply the results I found to help construct deterministic forecast of supply and demand for 2025 and beyond. In addition to assisting in forecasting, the results I found in my analysis also made me curious about how we could improve demand response resource in California and help them reach their full potential.

Specifically, If found that on average during peak demand conditions, demand response resources perform at around 60 to 70 percent of their reported capacity. This shocking result spurred me to look deeper into current California policy surrounding demand response resources and how we can seek to improve them. For now, I have found a few specific issues with the way that demand response resources are measured and how they are counted towards resource adequacy requirements that I am in the process of investigating. Hopefully, by the end of the summer I can put together a proposal -- supported by expert recommendations -- to improve demand response performance across California. The goal? Happy stakeholders across the board.