GROTON, Conn. — Robert Ethier has a dream: A day when ISO-NE no longer needs constant stakeholder meetings to tweak its market rules.
“We’ll know when we’ve hit on the right market design when we don’t need to make changes to accommodate the changes in the fundamentals,” Ethier, vice president of market operations for ISO-NE, said during a panel discussion at the New England Energy Conference and Exposition last week. “A good, stable, robust market design should adapt to pretty much whatever you can throw at it.”
Ethier said that although New England’s market has work to do to improve demand-side response and integrate the dispatch of wind, it has made progress over the last decade.
“The market is being driven much more by the fundamentals and by policy than by market design. … These markets are really being driven by the larger forces that are changing our economy — changes in fuel prices, changes in technology, changes in policy needs and desires. And that’s really what ought to be driving the markets. It shouldn’t be the market design that’s dominating the discussion.
“I hesitate to say this but I almost think we can see the day when the rate of change in the markets really decreases because the markets have the flexibility they need to react to whatever gets thrown at them,” he said.
