California’s electricity consumption is projected to increase dramatically over the coming decades due in large part to planned artificial intelligence data centers, although questions remain about how many of those data centers actually will be built.

Flexibility will be a core attribute of the various scenarios and solutions being discussed to meet the snowballing estimates of U.S. electric power demand, says columnist K Kaufmann.

The Extended Day-Ahead Market took center stage at CAISO in 2025 as the ISO tabled other long-term initiatives to ensure the market’s timely launch in May 2026, with PacifiCorp as its first participant.

CAISO is proposing a set of tariff changes for submission to FERC early in 2026 to help ease participants into the ISO’s new Extended Day-Ahead Market.

Citing an energy “emergency” in the Northwest this winter, DOE ordered TransAlta to continue operating Washington’s last coal-fired generating plant for three months beyond its scheduled retirement at the end of this year.

The Western Energy Markets Governing Body approved a set of revisions to CAISO's gas-fired energy generation resource management program after two years of work with stakeholders.

The Western Transmission Expansion Coalition plans to publish its 10-year outlook for Western transmission needs in February 2026 and has begun outlining the 20-year plan, according to Energy Strategies, which is developing the report.

CAISO and SPP have made “significant progress” on adapting existing tools to tackle seams between the two entities’ respective day-ahead markets, according to a CAISO representative.

A new CAISO paper lays out a series of challenges around how to improve participation of demand response and distributed energy resources in the ISO's day-ahead and real-time markets.

The California Department of Water Resources and other parties have asked CAISO to restart a transmission access charge initiative that was put on hold in 2018 due to the development of the ISO’s Extended Day-Ahead Market.