NYISO on Thursday unveiled a plan and timeline for revising its buyer-side mitigation (BSM) rules to expand resources’ exemption eligibility by the end of the year.

The first draft of NYISO’s 2021 Master Plan, which will be finalized by year-end, lists the ISO’s Comprehensive Mitigation Review project as key, saying it will simplify the BSM process and “mitigate or eliminate BSM risk” for resources necessary to achieve New York’s clean energy goals. (See NYISO Outlines Goals for Capacity Market.) The state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) requires the procurement of huge amounts of renewable energy resources to get to 100% zero-emission electricity by 2040.

NYISO is asking for stakeholder feedback in the form of the following questions:

• Should changes to BSM be focused primarily on exempting CLCPA resources, and how would such resources be defined?
• Should an exemption be explicit, or implicit/mechanical?
• Should the changes be focused on allowing revenues for attributes valued by state policy and not procured by the NYISO-administered wholesale markets?
• Should NYISO consider an approach similar to PJM’s proposal in April to push minimum offer price rule (MOPR) determinations to FERC? (See PJM Proposes Shifting MOPR Determinations to FERC.)

“We’re going to try to look at the broader BSM reforms … and one of the quick wins that we continue to look for some guidance on, and we’re hopeful that moves forward, is the Part A rules. We still find that if those got approved, that would certainly take some pressure off in the short run,” Michael DeSocio, NYISO director of market design, said in a presentation to the Installed Capacity Working Group. Part A exempts a new resource from BSM if the forecast of capacity prices in its first year of operation is higher than the default offer floor.

“I’d really like folks to think through how we might be able to devise such a mechanism and how we would justify that as you move it down to FERC,” DeSocio said. “We’re really trying to come up with a set of rules that will stand the test of time and we don’t need to constantly deal with new Band-Aids.”