By Michael Kuser

NYISO’s new five-year strategy calls for the ISO to align its competitive markets with New York’s efforts to promote clean energy and the “wave of change” sweeping the power industry.

All while still keeping an eye on long-term reliability for the state’s grid.

“Our [2018-2022] Strategic Plan reflects an approach of continuous adaptation to shifting market dynamics and a different industry paradigm,” NYISO CEO Brad Jones wrote in foreword to the plan, released Jan. 11. “It reaffirms our commitment to enhancing our markets, operations, and planning activities.”

Jones noted that “ongoing industry transformation” and New York’s “ambitious” energy policies will “redefine” the electricity system and wholesale markets.

“Long-term reliability depends upon finding ways to harmonize the competitive wholesale markets with the state’s actions to promote clean energy,” he said.

The broadly defined plan outlines several initiatives intended to help the ISO meet that goal over the next five years:

• Enhancing energy and capacity markets to maintain reliability and improve the efficiency of markets.
• Developing the tools necessary to operate the grid with increased numbers of distributed energy resources.
• Assuming a pivotal role in integrating public policy objectives while maintaining fair and competitive markets.
• Managing the increasingly “complex, costly” systems needed to run the grid and wholesale markets.
• Becoming equipped to manage costs “in an environment of decreasing MWh throughput.”

The plan also lays out more concrete steps for NYISO.

To ensure reliability and competitive markets, NYISO will upgrade its energy management and business management systems and automate the interconnection queue. The ISO also plans to improve cyber security by improving security operations and enhancing perimeter defenses as well as overall security resiliency. (See RTO CEOs Discuss Cybersecurity, Integrating Renewables.)

Grid and market operations will incorporate new capabilities to support the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and improvements in wide area situational awareness in smart grid applications, the report said.

The plan also highlighted NYISO’s key accomplishments in 2017, which included publishing its DER Roadmap describing how the ISOs expects distributed energy resources to integrate into wholesale markets and working with the New York State Department of Public Service on pricing carbon into its wholesale electricity market. (See NYISO Readies Market for Energy Storage, State Targets.)