By Jason Fordney
LOS ANGELES — CAISO’s proposal to extend its day-ahead market across the Western Energy Imbalance Market (EIM) could be tailored to uniquely fit a region historically resistant to organized markets, a key participant in the roll-out of the EIM said.
The ISO’s Extended Day-Ahead Market (EDAM) proposal could also be done without the political and economic entanglements involved with an RTO, Portland General Electric Director of Transmission Services Sarah Edmonds said during a March 9 public meeting of the EIM Regional Issues Forum (RIF). It could strike a balance between an ISO transmission access charge and a full RTO construct, she said.
“It is possible that with EDAM, a different construct will be born,” Edmonds said, adding that her comments reflected her own opinions, but they are “illustrative of the kinds of questions and issues the EIM community would be looking at” to determine their interest in day-ahead market participation.
In her previous job as general counsel for PacifiCorp, Edmonds served on the EIM’s Transitional Committee, which advised CAISO’s Board of Governors on the development of the market’s governance structure.
A “winning feature” of the EIM has been that participating balancing authority areas retain their responsibilities and control, Edmonds said, pointing also to the benefits of voluntary participation and no exit fee. But as they explore EDAM, industry participants will need to address the many issues around how excess transmission capacity is shared. (See CAISO Plan Extends Day-Ahead Market to EIM.)
As for an RTO, the issue of governance — which was still being debated in the California legislature when last year’s regionalization effort stalled — is “center stage,” Edmonds said. Lawmakers are working on new legislation this session. (See Calif. Lawmakers Relaunch CAISO Regionalization.)
Governance is important because “the power of who gets to decide what issue is a big deal when you are talking about what comes with a full regional ISO,” Edmonds said.
Industry stakeholders still have many questions about transmission development and costs in a Western RTO because of the longer transmission lines, distance between loads and other planning considerations such as increased adoptions of distributed energy. Other complications include state roles in resource adequacy planning, transmission access charges and a regional transmission planning framework, she said.
“These issues really come up and are of particular concern in a regional ISO context,” she said, adding that there is also a “deeply ingrained culture of self-determination in the West.”
‘A Lot of Work’
Kathy Anderson, Idaho Power systems operations leader, told the RIF that her utility has been working on EIM implementation for two years and is due to go fully live on April 4, having shifted the date from April 1 because of the Easter holiday. One of the uses of the market will be to market renewable energy from qualifying facilities under the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act.
Anderson told the forum that the two-year process to integrate into the EIM has not been easy.
“I don’t think I really appreciated it until I was right in the middle of it. It was a lot of work,” Anderson said. “There were very few places in the company that we didn’t touch with this.”
The company employed three full-time external contractors and hired 6 employees to work directly on the EIM. It also required new software applications and outage management system.
Idaho Power and Canadian marketer Powerex have been in parallel operations with the EIM, in preparation for going live early next month. (See EIM Participants Seek Resource Test Tweaks.)