CAISO’s Extended Day-Ahead Market is on schedule to launch May 1 with PacifiCorp as its first participant, as the new market goes through a third and final phase of parallel operations testing before starting.
The ISO urged EDAM participants to “remain fully engaged in real-time operations” by submitting real-time economic bids, staff noted during an April 9 meeting to discuss the market’s status.
“Doing so ensures sufficient system flexibility and supports the fulfillment of associated DAME product obligations, and ensures the real-time market results being produced reflect economic pricing and are both production-like and operationally feasible,” CAISO staff said, referring to the day-ahead market enhancements (DAME) that will go live in parallel with EDAM.
But EDAM parallel operations testing has highlighted some potential problems, including issues with data, Khaled Abdul-Rahman, CAISO chief information and technology officer, said during the meeting.
“The data is always a challenge for us,” Abdul-Rahman said. “Which data do you want to use from the parallel operations? Is it data from production? Is it data that participants are submitting on the parallel operations systems? This has always been a challenge for us.”
For EDAM’s launch, data sorting is “even more challenging because we are dealing with changes that require additional data in our parallel operations,” Abdul-Rahman added.
One data issue occurred on April 6 when CAISO observed an “extreme” Residual Unit Commitment (RUC) price for SCE. The RUC is a reliability tool for committing resources and procuring capacity that has not been reflected in the day-ahead schedule. The ISO identified and has since corrected the issue, Abdul-Rahman said.
There were also some problems with greenhouse gas (GHG) pricing.
“We were seeing a lot of zero GHG prices in the real time when we are expecting [prices] greater than zero,” Abdul-Rahman said.
CAISO’s GHG model distinguishes between the ISO’s balancing area and California’s GHG regulation area, and differences between GHG data from the two areas resulted in high GHG prices during parallel operations training. The GHG issues were “largely corrected but some high prices persist due to area definitions,” CAISO staff said. The ISO therefore plans to match California’s GHG regulation area with CAISO’s area, staff said.
Another “major impact” in the ongoing real-time testing was that BPA said it would not participate in parallel operations “due to some change on their side that they need to [implement] before they start participating,” Abdul-Rahman said.
“BPA was very short in terms of satisfying their load by 7,000 MW and that is due to the parallel operations omission,” he said.
One participant asked how CAISO is going to manage EDAM’s implementation schedule if issues continue beyond April 15.
“We don’t believe there are any big issues left to make configurations changes,” Abdul-Rahman said. “Any configurations changes will be after go-live. The current issues that we are talking about can be resolved. I feel comfortable about that.”
As of April 13, CAISO received 721 issues cases regarding EDAM testing phases. The ISO has closed or resolved 512 of those cases, Gio Arechavaleta, CAISO senior client representative, said during an April 13 EDAM parallel operations meeting.
Currently, about 120 scheduling coordinators are participating in EDAM testing, Arechavaleta said.
