FERC on Tuesday approved a civil penalty of $1 million against Algonquin Power & Utilities’ Windsor Locks gas plant in Connecticut for mishandling its multiple generators when offering into the ISO-NE markets in 2012-2013 (IN21-2).

The settlement between the commission’s Office of Enforcement and Algonquin also entails the plant disgorging $1.1 million in capacity payments to ISO-NE and being subject to compliance monitoring for up to two years.

The Windsor Locks plant is a 71-MW combined cycle cogeneration facility, with a 40-MW dual-fuel generator, a 16-MW steam turbine and a 15-MW Solar Titan 130 generator, the last of which, despite its name, is a gas turbine. The first two units came online in 1990, while the third was installed in 2012.

The plant sold excess power under a Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act agreement until 2010, after which it became a dispatchable resource in the ISO-NE energy markets and an intermittent power resource in the Forward Capacity Market. Algonquin initially hired a third party to serve as its lead market participant (LMP) and to provide bidding strategies and guidance on compliance matters.

But the company later moved this function in-house to subsidiary Algonquin Energy Services (AES), which “did not have sufficient experience scheduling resources in the ISO-NE markets or managing the attendant tariff obligations at the time,” the commission said.

After the plant installed the 15-MW generator, ISO-NE’s grid monitoring software recorded the electricity being generated by all three generators as one resource, instead of recording separate meter data for each of the generation facilities. As a result, ISO-NE’s software was not able to distinguish which generator was operating absent additional communication from the plant or AES and was unable to confirm how many megawatts of incremental energy would be available in a certain time period.

Meanwhile, plant staff and AES tried to continue operating according to the procedures that the third-party LMP had designed before the new generator was added, assuming that the ISO-NE control room would alert them if the plant was violating its compliance obligations. But because of the mismanaged modeling, ISO-NE found that the plant was underbidding its capacity into the day-ahead energy market, Forward Capacity Market (FCM) and Forward Reserve Market (FRM).

“Windsor Locks and AES lacked the internal knowledge, personnel and experience necessary to understand and manage compliance obligations after Windsor Locks added the Solar Titan generator,” FERC said. “Enforcement determined that the offers did not reflect the resource’s unit-specific operating characteristics. Moreover, it determined that Windsor Locks should be required to disgorge a portion of the capacity payments it received during the relevant period commensurate with the degree to which the offers fell short of the FCM offer obligation.”