Azure Zhou, BS ‘25, Symbolic Systems
Undergraduate Fellow, Market Analysis team
California ISO
When Stanford lost power in late June, I had a running joke with my friends that the outage was my personal fault. Of course, I had no hand in the fire that damaged PG&E’s transmission lines feeding into our campus. I am, however, working to help keep lights on and to increase the effectiveness of the electric grid at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) this summer.
My work at CAISO has been focused on two fronts: enhancing the design of the wholesale electricity market and understanding the performance of energy storage on the grid. CAISO is working on an initiative to introduce a new product to their day-ahead markets in order to account for uncertainties in forecasts between day-ahead and real-time markets. One of the projects I’ve been tasked with is developing a methodology to determine a real-time energy price cap for bids on this product. Encouraged by methods used by forecasting teams at CAISO, I have been working on a quantile regression analysis of historical pricing, net load, and gas price data.
My second project was to create an internal dashboard that provides a visualization of daily market data from battery units and other storage resources on the grid. In the past couple of years, battery storage has been playing an increasingly greater role on the electric grid; it’s important that we are able to understand how these resources are working within the market design. If you’d like to check out more, a public version of this daily report is available on the CAISO website.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started work earlier this summer–certainly not that my first task would be to read through a 400 page document. I thought I had gotten a hang of energy acronyms after taking Professor Bruce Cain’s energy policy course in the spring, but the business manual detailing all of CAISO’s market operations was a whole new animal. DAME vs. EDAM, RTD vs. RTPD. Though it took me a while, learning CAISO-speak paid off in every future meeting. I was also surprised by simply how much data I was working with every day. Some of my queries would take so long to load that I’d have time to make myself a quick lunch before it finished!
There were a few hurdles getting started, but it has been such a pleasure to work with the Market Analysis team for the past couple of months. Each of my team members have been so welcoming, and I’ve learned so much from them about market infrastructure and what it takes to keep the electric markets running efficiently. CAISO also organized an excellent speaker series for the interns. We were able to hear about ‘war stories’ from CAISO veterans, major events that shaped the grid’s trajectory, the role of Community Choice Aggregation (CCA)s, and meet many other teams across the company.
This experience has been a great opportunity for me to explore the data science side of tackling the energy crisis, and I’m really excited to see how CAISO’s markets and transmission continue to evolve. I look forward to showing you all my final work!
