Energy Commission Profile
Editor’s note: Following is one in an ongoing series of profiles of the largest California state government agencies.
The California Energy Commission has a budget of $488 million for the 2017-18 fiscal year. $2.6 million of this has been allocated to its IT department, not including personnel costs and other expenditures from offices within the Energy Commission.
The Energy Commission is currently working on a $750,000 Energy Analytics Information Platform (EAIP) pilot project, also referred to as the data lake. It is expected to be completed within the next year.
It will be “a repository to easily manage large amounts of disparate data and provide analytical capabilities to more effectively perform analyses, make decisions, and report information to stakeholders in support of a variety of mandates,” CIO Steve Bonta told Techwire in an email.
“In particular, the data lake will give us larger capacity to ingest and analyze large-scale data to better evaluate and formulate enhanced building efficiency standards and do more forecasting for a variety of energy-related subjects,” Bonta continued.
The CIO predicts data modeling computing resources advancements like cloud services “could be transformational for the Energy Commission as the need to analyze more and larger data sets outgrows the existing traditional computing resources.”
However, security may become an issue with these advancements.
“Improving and expanding existing protections and responding to new challenges will consume constrained existing resources and require more resources plus new knowledge,” Bonta explained.
Technology is expected to be an important part of analyzing and gathering data as it allows for adaptation to evolving energy policy direction and standards.
The Energy Commission’s IT Department intends to enhance its strategic partnership with the business side to collaborate on and improve technical solutions. It also plans to gain a better understanding of the enterprise in order to facilitate implementation of large-scale IT solutions.
It will be moving away from “the traditional service provider to becoming service brokers and exploring coming trends and advancements in business-enabling technologies,” Bonta said.
Chair – Robert B. Weisenmiller
Contact info: robert.weisenmiller@energy.ca.gov
Chief Information Officer – Steve Bonta
Contact info: steve.bonta@energy.ca.gov
916-653-3873
