Real-world Automation of Time-Series Forecasting & Power Flow at SCE

Time-series data based (hourly or 8760 data) forecasting and power flow analysis have been an aspiration of electric utility companies for decades.  Many companies are stuck with coarse grain forecast and peak value (once a year) based power flow analysis due to outdated legacy system design, despite the tremendous advance in technology over the past decade.  Tasks that were once unthinkable, such as processing trillions of time-series data in hours, are in the realm of possibility now with recent advances in technology such as cloud-native design and open-source innovations.

Southern California Edison (SCE) embarked on a journey to turn system-wide time-series data (8760) based transformer structure level forecast and power flow analysis into reality, replacing outdated peak-based tools with a high performance, flexible, scalable, cloud-native, and open-source platform to modernize electric system planning. By utilizing massively parallel processing available on Snowflake for maximum performance, SCE achieved unprecedented results—processing 4.3 trillion load and DER records in 21 hours. 

SCE’s solution is a first-of-its-kind in the U.S. electric utility industry, delivering capabilities that no off-the-shelf platform can match. Unlike traditional tools that rely on peak-based analysis, it enables full time-series analysis down to the transformer structure level (meter level is also possible), meeting regulatory requirements that other systems cannot support. It is designed to handle multi-scenario forecasting, automated simulations at scale, and real-time investment creation. Its physics-based digital twin modeling, cloud-native architecture, and open-source design make it future-proof, eliminating hardware constraints while vastly improving grid planning efficiency with near-linear scalability.

This session will take place on February 3rd at 10:15-10:45am at the Grid Edge Intelligence Booth #4845 with the following speakers:

John Lee, IT Architect (Systems Design), Enterprise Architecture – T&D - Southern California Edison
Jerome Marr, Sr. Mgr. – IT ETS / Grid Modernization – Engineering & Planning Tools - Southern California Edison
Lawrence Rusli Yonathan, Senior Engineer- System Planning Tools - Southern California Edison