UC San Diego Launches Interdisciplinary Course on AI for Smart Grids: A new graduate course at the UCSD is helping students bridge the worlds of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and power engineering. ECE 285: Data Science and AI for Smart Grids, introduces students to modern AI techniques—especially Agentic AI and large language models (LLMs)—while grounding them in the fundamentals of electric power systems.

Taught by Assistant Professor Yuanyuan Shi in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the course responds to the growing need for engineers who can apply AI to real energy infrastructure. Students learn topics ranging from renewable energy integration, demand response, and grid optimization and control in power engineering to prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), LLMs, and agentic AI.

A key feature of the class is its hands-on team project, where students build AI-driven tools for sustainable smart grid applications such as renewable forecasting, EV scheduling, distributed energy resource management, power grid simulation, and contingency analysis. Each team presents a live demo of their agentic AI system at the end of the quarter.

“We created this course to bridge the gap between AI and power engineering,” said Prof. Yuanyuan Shi. “Our goal is to give students the tools to apply modern AI to emerging sustainability and energy challenges—from renewable integration to intelligent grid control.” Students say the interdisciplinary approach is especially valuable. “It’s exciting to apply AI models to solve real power system problems,” said one student. “The project-based format makes it feel like we’re building solutions that could actually be used in practice.”