The California Energy Commission on July 8 approved a $3 million grant for UC Irvine to study short-term forecasting of behind-the-meter energy resources, including rooftop solar, home batteries and electric-vehicle charging.
At the agency’s business meeting, staff said the project, called SIGNAL — short for Socioeconomic-Geographic Intelligence for Grid Net-Load Analytics and Learning — is meant to improve the models grid operators use to forecast net load and manage real-time operations. In the presentation, Alejandra Rios of the commission’s Energy Research and Development Division said California’s rapid growth in behind-the-meter resources has created a visibility gap for grid operators such as CAISO, which cannot directly observe what those systems are doing.
Rios said the project will develop a standardized data workflow, a forecasting model and a validation plan. She said the team will test the model in a community demonstration at Laguna Woods Village and in real-world grid operations alongside CAISO. The presentation also said the project will include collaborators from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC San Diego and RAP Incorporated, with Southern California Edison, SDG&E and LADWP providing customer-level energy data.
The staff presentation said the funding would support better short-term forecasting during high-variability events such as heat waves and wildfires, and could improve grid resilience, flexibility and ratepayer savings. It also said the project is expected to help utilities and CAISO better plan generation reserves, capacity and real-time operations.
During public comment, Stephen Rosenblum urged the commission to support bidirectional EV charging standards. Commissioner Nancy Skinner said the work could be useful for the agency’s Integrated Energy Policy Report process, and Commissioner David Hochschild said he had previously supervised Rios when she served as a science fellow in his office.
The commission then voted 4-0 to approve the item, according to the meeting transcript.
