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Explore Energy is a cross-campus effort of the Precourt Institute for Energy.

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The Future of Load Forecasting in the Context of Climate Change

Jake Hofgard, BS ‘24, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering
Undergraduate Fellow
Western Interstate Energy Board

(Photo credit: Jake Hofgard)

The Western Interstate Energy Board (WIEB) is an organization with a variety of responsibilities, ranging from coordinating regional participation in California’s energy imbalance market to advising regulators about the transport of nuclear waste across state lines. In essence, WIEB exists to monitor the Western energy ecosystem, ensure that everything is running smoothly (with as much cooperation as possible), and to provide relevant advice when something goes wrong.

Unfortunately, as climate change drives up temperatures and produces extreme drought conditions across the West, things going wrong will become more common. California’s widespread power outages during the summer of 2020 were just one example out of many of the impact that climate change can have on the grid, and industry experts expect such occurrences to become far more frequent in the coming decades.

Along with Evan Savage, the graduate fellow at WIEB this summer, I’ve been tasked with pointing regulators and policymakers in the right direction when it comes to tackling climate change and ensuring that the Western grid is as resilient as possible against extreme temperatures and drought. With a comprehensive set of temperature and precipitation data from across the West, we first worked to pinpoint trends in the data that might pique the interest of regulators and planners with concerns about the future of load forecasting.

As expected, we found uniform increases in temperatures across the region. More interesting, however, are the trends that we’ve found in extreme weather events in the West. After all, understanding weather outliers (and especially predicting peak load days, when outages are most likely) is essential to load forecasting. Developing a more accurate methodology for forecasting heatwaves and other extreme events has been one of the most important and interesting facets of my work at WIEB.

Working at WIEB has also given us access to contacts across the energy industry, and we’ve already had informative conversations about load forecasting, resource adequacy, and climate change with almost half a dozen utilities across the West. Our conversation with the scientists and load forecasting researchers at the Northwest Power and Conservation Council has been my favorite so far. Learning about the Council’s research gave us a great insight into the state-of-the-art when it comes to load forecasting.

On a day-to-day basis, I split my time between working in-person at WIEB’s Denver office and remotely from Boulder, Colorado. My daily routine typically involves a variety of tasks: performing statistical analysis on weather data; creating, training, and testing forecasting and anomaly detection models; and interviewing industry experts about common load forecasting techniques and the future of the industry. Outside of work, I’ve enjoyed walking around the 16th Street Mall near the Denver office and finding great, underrated restaurants for lunch. In Boulder (where I grew up), hitting the trails and climbing destinations sprinkled all around the city after work will never get old. On weekends, I spend my time working towards my goal of climbing all of Colorado’s mountains above 14,000 feet, which I’m trying to finish by the end of the summer!