IESO successfully launched its nodal market May 1, reporting few glitches during its rollout.
The Ontario ISO added nearly 1,000 generation, load and intertie pricing nodes to replace its province-wide price while also creating a financially binding day-ahead market.
Nodal real-time prices ranged from ‑$100 to $367/MWh as of mid-afternoon.
“It seems like everything kicked off without a hitch,” said Portia Gilman, market monitoring manager for Yes Energy. The company’s systems began receiving pre-dispatch data at 2 a.m. EPT and real-time pricing data about 4 a.m.
The Market Renewal Program is intended to improve the way IESO supplies, schedules and prices power. The ISO says the new market will save Ontario $700 million over the next decade through reduced out-of-market payments and increased efficiency.
IESO suspended the real-time market at 10 p.m. April 30 to begin the transition to the new market. It also temporarily stopped the use of its Prudential collateral system, implementing an alternative monitoring procedure until the system resumes on May 8.
The day-ahead market will not run on May 1 or May 2, subject to IESO’s market failure rules (Chapter 7, section 4.3.2).
The ISO suspended automated electronic dispatches in the lead-up to the launch, announcing at 2:01 a.m. that HE03 pre-dispatch results would be published for the HE04 look-ahead period and used going forward. It said it would issue dispatch instructions verbally during the transition period.
At 3:07 a.m., the ISO acknowledged that market participants were having trouble accessing public and private reports from the HE02 pre-dispatch run, a problem it reported had been resolved by 8:25 a.m.
It said planned maintenance between 6:15 and 6:30 a.m. could cause three five-minute dispatches to be missed, and verbal dispatch instructions would be issued as needed.
Posting in the ISO’s Power Data section should resume by the end of May 4, and static market content will be updated on the public website after the market suspension is lifted May 2.
IESO says nodal pricing — which is used in all seven U.S. RTOs and ISOs — is crucial to efficiently dispatching and providing market signals to renewables and new resource types such as distributed energy resources, storage and hybrids.
Another milestone will come on May 8, when the ISO begins virtual trading in nine zones. (See Ontario Introducing Nodal Market May 1.)
[Note: RTO Insider is a wholly owned subsidiary of Yes Energy.]
