24 April 2021
At the second day of the ‘Leaders Climate Summit’ convened by President Joe Biden, the former CEO of the Australian Energy Market Operator Audrey Zibelman, announced that the United States and the United Kingdom will be joining the Global Power Systems Transformation Consortium (GPSTC).
“[Balancing supply and demand] has always been a difficult engineering challenge, but is becoming even more so as we decarbonise the grid,” she said. Zibelman cites her experience in the AEMO control room during the Black Summer 2020 bushfires. “We were losing major parts of the system. The limitations of our modelling and visualisation tools meant we had to act with incomplete information. Because it was all they had, our engineers relied on experience rather than accurate data to make critical decisions”, Zibelman said.
April 06, 2021
Q: What does the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) do?
CAISO operates the high-voltage transmission system and the energy market for about 80% of California and a small portion of Nevada. We’re the entity that matches the real-time supply of electricity with demand and is responsible for efficiently integrating the next generation of clean energy resources into the grid.
In addition to our fundamental responsibility as a primarily single-state independent system operator, increasingly we’re taking on broader functions across the western United States. Those include monitoring reliability and operating an energy imbalance market that lets us buy and sell energy with the Northwest, the Intermountain West, and the desert Southwest.