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CAISO net load forecast
the California ISO's own demand, wind, and solar forecasts, combined into the number generators actually plan against — with every input shown alongside it.
Fetching the latest published forecast…
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the California ISO's own demand, wind, and solar forecasts, combined into the number generators actually plan against — with every input shown alongside it.
How steep is California's evening ramp this week?
CAISO net load peaks at 34,925 MW on Fri, 7 PM, against a low of 3,517 MW — a swing of 31,408 MW across the window. Net load is the heaviest area at 34,925 MW.
Every line above, and who produced it.
The grid operator's own published forecast for these hours. Source: the California ISO (composed by Ask the Grid).
What settled — the realized values every forecast here is scored against.
Generating capacity expected to be available to serve demand.
Each day of the window on its own.
Every hour of the window, shaded by load.
| 0 | 6 | 12 | 18 | |||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thu, 8/27 |
| Series | Peak (MW) | Peak hour | Low (MW) | Average (MW) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Net load | 34,925 | Fri, 7 PM | 3,517 | 20,947 |
| Gross demand | 41,324 | Fri, 5 PM | 24,980 | 31,414 |
| Wind + solar | 22,914 | Sat, 2 PM | 1,640 | 10,467 |
| Forecast | Produced by | Method | Horizon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Net load forecast | the California ISO (composed by Ask the Grid) | CAISO load forecast, wind forecast, and solar forecast | As far as all three published forecasts overlap, hourly |
| Wind + solar forecast | the California ISO (composed by Ask the Grid) | CAISO load forecast, wind forecast, and solar forecast | As far as all three published forecasts overlap, hourly |
Every input is a point forecast with no confidence interval, and their errors do not cancel — a demand forecast running high and a wind forecast running low both push net load the same way, so this series can be wrong by more than any one of its inputs.
Net load is demand minus wind minus solar — the electricity the dispatchable fleet has to produce once the renewables have delivered what they are expected to. It is not published by the California ISO as a feed; this page composes it from three forecasts that are, and plots all three so the subtraction is visible rather than asserted.
California invented the duck curve, and this is it. Midday solar pushes net load down to a trough, then the sun sets against an evening peak and the grid has to find several gigawatts in about three hours. That ramp is the single most-planned-for event in CAISO operations and the reason the state built the largest battery fleet in the country.
Look at the depth of the midday belly and the slope out of it. The trough tells you how much solar is on the system; the slope tells you what the batteries, imports, and gas fleet have to deliver before dinner.
A net-load point exists only for hours where all three forecasts do. The three feeds have different horizons, so this curve ends wherever the shortest of them ends — it is never extended by holding a wind or solar forecast flat past its own reach, which would invent the number the page exists to state.
curl "https://askthegrid.com/api/v1/grid/series?iso=CAISO&metric=load_forecast&zone=SYSTEM&hours=168" curl "https://askthegrid.com/api/v1/grid/radar/curves?iso=CAISO&horizon=extended"
Connect your agent to mcp.askthegrid.com and this forecast is a tool call away — the same host Claude and ChatGPT connectors already use.
Electricity demand minus the wind and solar expected to serve it. It is what the dispatchable fleet — gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, and batteries — is actually called on to produce, and it is the curve generators and traders plan around rather than demand itself.
The shape California's net load makes across a day: high in the morning, sagging deep into a midday belly as solar floods the system, then rising steeply into the evening as solar sets against peak demand. Plotted over 24 hours it looks like a duck, and the neck is the part operators worry about.
The three inputs are. The subtraction is ours, and it is stated plainly for that reason: the California ISO publishes a demand forecast, a wind forecast, and a solar forecast, and this page combines them on matched hours without adjusting any of them.
Plotted window Aug 27, 10:00 PM PDT → Aug 30, 12:00 AM PDT. Recomputed whenever any of the three inputs is republished.
| Fri, 8/28 |
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| Sat, 8/29 |
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| Sun, 8/30 |
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Darkest cells are the tightest hours. The window peaks at 34,925 MW on Fri, 7 PM, local to the market.