Brad Bouillon, California Independent System Operator
Brad Bouillon is the Director of Operations Policy and Analytics at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). During Bouillon’s 25 years at CAISO, he has worked as a Settlements Manager, managed the Reliability Must Run (RMR) Contract Settlement group, managed the Settlements Design group and worked as a Manager in the Market Quality group. Bouillon has also managed the Day-Ahead Market, Interchange Scheduling and Outage Coordination departments. In his current role, his team is responsible for gas and electric coordination, supporting new policy and new market products affecting the CAISO’s Real-Time Operators as well as supporting state, regional, national, and international operations-related policy. His team also manages performance and statistical analysis relating to operations event response optimization, including root cause analysis and predictive analytics. Bouillon has a BS degree in Accounting, as well as an MBA in Management, an MS in Computer Information Systems, an Advanced Masters Certificate in Applied Project Management, and a Masters Certificate in Data Analytics.
Tell us about your role at CAISO, and how it relates to G-PST.
One of my roles at the CAISO involves collecting international “best practices”, as well as sharing my company’s best practices with others. My team and I have worked on international efforts for more than eight years. Over that time my efforts evolved more and more towards the broader decarbonization efforts we see in multiple countries, and G-PST is a related effort. G-PST effort supports others through this transition, which is well aligned with the CAISO CEO’s [Elliot Mainzer’s] vision.
CAISO is one of G-PST’s founding system operators. In your own words, why is G-PST’s mandate, of supporting system operators through the clean energy transition, so critical to successfully decarbonizing power systems around the world?
In addition to my own beliefs, CAISO’s CEO has a clear vision that, while the CAISO is a leader in global decarbonization, success is much broader than a single organization. As such, we have an obligation to ensure everyone wins this effort.
What projects are you working on, either with CAISO and/or G-PST, that you are most excited about right now, and why?
The most exciting products I am involved with currently are the Control Room of the Future and evolving Grid Forming Inverters research through G-PST. Further, my team’s work on understanding the evolution of battery storage, its operability characteristics and related reliability contribution are quite exciting as well.
What do you find to be the most meaningful or motivating aspect of your work?
Knowing that I am working towards something bigger than any of us individuals or organizations makes the clean energy transition effort even more motivating.
If you could give any advice to young or early-career people in the power systems field, what would it be?
This field is as broad and as exciting as you make it. The changes we are seeing currently are amazing and the opportunities to make a difference are right here! We have a unique opportunity to make a difference that generations who come after us will be impacted by. It’s a special time to be working with the evolving power grid and related systems.
Finally, tell us a little bit about yourself – how do you like to spend your time outside of work?
Outside of work I spend time with my family traveling either to spend time outdoors, or to Disneyland. I am very lucky that my entire family enjoys both types of experiences — and living in California supports these adventures! On the utility nerd front, I am very interested in the evolving electric vehicle (EV) landscape. I own one EV and have others on order. Monitoring charging of the EVs with my rooftop solar to optimize the power distribution is also a hobby.