California’s grid management definitely has issues. I’m not very familiar with this grid management stuff, but I’ve read all CAISO’s reports on what happened in

California’s grid management definitely has issues. I’m not very familiar with this grid management stuff, but I’ve read all CAISO’s reports on what happened in august 2020 that led to the rolling blackouts, and there’s some stuff in there that seemed pretty crazy. The highlight for me is that CAISO’s day-ahead energy market had some features and “enhancements” such that it 1) ignored the constraint to make physically feasible schedules with enough supply to meet demand, and 2) developed schedules based on “virtual supply” rather than actual physical supply, and 3) develops the schedule based a bid-in demand figure that is consistently well below the actual demand. The result of this is that CAISO’s system generated mostly-binding schedules in which CA exported sort of a lot of power to low priority areas at the same time as CA was having rolling blackouts. I guess financial markets are generally pretty good for solving this sort of problem, but it feels like some optimization based on the real constraints would be useful. http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Final-Root-Cause-Analysis-Mid-August-2020-Extreme-Heat-Wave.pdf http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Final-Root-Cause-Analysis-Mid..., the whole thing is interesting, the issues I mentioned are mostly described in sections 4.3 and B.3. My understanding of this may not be correct, so refer to that report as the source of truth, and please let me know if my description is not accurate.