Parser Helper Challenge

Welcome to your Electricity Maps technical challenge! We have 45 minutes to attempt building a parser for load forecasts of the Califonian grid.

Most of California is covered by the California ISO. The name is abbreviated to US-CAL-CISO within Electricity Maps, but can be found as CISO or CAISO elsewhere. We've heard that the independent system operator (ISO) has a data portal where they publish load forecasts. We'd like to build a parser so that we can start ingesting these forecasts, turn them into features and improve our forecasting engine.

We're providing a notebook to gather your code, thoughts and answers.

## Setup

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Task 1 - Identify a data source

A competitor has access to forecasts for the California ISO, as demonstrated by their data explorer.

Your first task is to:

1. Identify the dataset that holds load forecasts for the day-ahead market for the California ISO.
2. Identify the data source from which the dataset is derived.

Task 2 - Find a way to download the data

Based on this data source, try to find a way to download a data sample as .csv.

Task 3 - Propose a way to programmatically parse the data

Once you have a data sample, propose a way to programmatically parse the data into a format that is easy to work with.

Task 4 - Implement the parser

Implement the parser in Python. If you've not have had time to build the parser, you can simply parse the .csv file attached here as 20250127_20250129_SLD_FCST_N_20250127_00_22_13_v1.csv.