RENSSELAER, N.Y. — NYISO power prices surged to an average of $99.55/MWh in January, up 89% from December and 148% from the same month a year ago, Rana Mukerji, senior vice president for market structures, told the Business Issues Committee on Wednesday.

The ISO’s year-to-date monthly energy prices averaged $101.54/MWh in January, an increase of 142% from a year earlier. Average sendout was 463 GWh/day, compared with 444 GWh/day in December and 431 GWh/day a year ago.

New York natural gas prices jumped 136% for the month, averaging $17.94/MMBtu at the Transco Z6 hub. Prices were up 369% from a year ago. Gas prices peaked at $140.06/MMBtu on Jan. 4, near the end of a two-week cold spell.

FERC on Jan. 12 granted a waiver request enabling the ISO to consider incremental energy and minimum generation offers that exceed $1,000/MWh if the generator is able to demonstrate such costs. The waiver covers Jan. 4 to Feb. 28. (See FERC Grants NYISO ‘Cold Snap’ Offer Cap Waiver.)

Distillate prices gained 28.2% year over year, with Jet Kerosene Gulf Coast averaging $14.47/MMBtu. Ultra Low Sulfur No. 2 Diesel NY Harbor averaged $14.83/MMBtu, up from $13.91/MMBtu in December.

The ISO’s local reliability share was 59 cents/MWh, up from 9 cents/MWh the previous month, while the statewide share dropped 74 cents from the previous month to -$1.52/MWh. Total uplift costs were lower than in December.

Evaluation of Energy Market Offer Cap

Reviewing the Broader Regional Markets report, Mukerji highlighted NYISO’s ongoing effort to resolve differences between regional offer caps that may interfere with economic- and reliability-driven interchange scheduling.

FERC this month accepted NYISO’s Order 831 compliance filing, which requires the grid operator to cap incremental energy offers at the higher of $1,000/MWh or a resource’s verified cost-based offer, which in turn are capped at $2,000/MWh when calculating locational-based marginal prices.

Mukerji also noted that FERC last month accepted the ISO’s motion to terminate its obligation to submit annual informational filings on its implementation of interface pricing and congestion management and market-to-market coordination initiatives with its neighboring RTOs/ISOs.

The report also said the ISO has analyzed real-time commitment (RTC) and real-time dispatch (RTD) convergence and last month presented the Market Issues Working Group with recommendations to continue to aid the convergence this year. The ISO aims to improve modeling consistency between RTC and RTD and assess improvements to look-ahead evaluations to facilitate more efficient scheduling and price convergence.

NYISO also is working to clarify the minimum deliverability requirements for external capacity from PJM into the New York Installed Capacity (ICAP) market, Mukerji said. At the Jan. 17 BIC meeting, the ISO received approval for ICAP Manual revisions regarding the documentation requirements for capacity imports across the PJM AC ties, which will become effective May 1. (See “BIC Recommends ICAP Manual Revisions,” NYISO Business Issues Committee Briefs: Jan. 17, 2018.)

Day-Ahead Market Congestion Settlements

The BIC on Wednesday recommended that NYISO’s Management Committee approve revisions to Attachment N of the Tariff that provide a methodology to allocate day-ahead market congestion rent shortfalls and surpluses resulting from changes in transmission facility availability to the responsible transmission owner.

Operations Analysis and Services Supervisor Tolu Dina explained how the methodology uses a de minimis threshold to determine circumstances when allocations to responsible TOs are not calculated.

The threshold applies to day-ahead constraint residuals (shortfalls and surpluses resulting from changes in transmission facility availability) that are less than $5,000, provided the sum of all such residuals below the threshold is not greater than $250,000 or 5% of the sum of all residuals for the month. Attachment N currently requires the ISO to conduct certain informational calculations once a year to help in assessing whether the de minimis threshold level presents any concerns.

External Capacity Rights

The BIC approved revisions to the ICAP Manual to better define the amount of capacity that can be imported into New York from neighboring control areas for the 2018/2019 capability year.

Josh Boles, the ISO’s manager for ICAP operations, said the New York State Reliability Council regulates the amount of emergency assistance from neighboring RTOs and “we’re only allowing imports up to a level where we would violate the one-day-in-10 criteria.”

Alternative Methods for Determining LCRs

The BIC recommended the Management Committee approve revisions to the Market Administration and Control Area Services Tariff to establish an alternative method for calculating locational minimum installed capacity requirements.

Zachary Stines, associate market design specialist, presented NYISO’s market design for determining locational capacity requirements (LCRs) for localities that minimize total cost of capacity at the level of excess condition while maintaining the reliability criterion and not exceeding transmission security limits.

The NYISO plan evaluates net energy and ancillary services revenue at different levels of installed capacity using data from the most recent of either the capability year after a quadrennial “demand curve reset” or the annual update.

The ISO has incorporated into the proposed Tariff revisions incremental revisions recommended by stakeholders at the Feb. 6 Installed Capacity Working Group/Market Issues Working Group meeting, Stines said.

BIC Rejects On Ramp/Off Ramp Changes

The BIC also voted against recommending that the Management Committee approve a market design proposal and related Tariff revisions for eliminating localities and revising the existing on ramp/off ramp rules to create a new locality.

Zachary Smith, manager of capacity market design, told the BIC that the proposed methodology is based on reliability planning principles developed to determine whether to create and eliminate localities.

The proposed design was intended to make locality price signals direct investment to supply that provides the greatest reliability benefit.

Mark Younger of Hudson Energy Economics called the proposal “a flawed market design.”

“It is attempting to use the transmission security test to estimate a resource adequacy requirement,” Younger said. “The result of the NYISO’s test as proposed is that it will understate the resource adequacy needs and would therefore result in creating localities too late and eliminating them too early.”

Mukerji said that while the ISO has fully mapped out its resources and budget for the year, stakeholders could choose to juggle priorities in a related working group to make room for reworking the on ramp/off ramp proposal.

— Michael Kuser