By William Opalka

The New England Power Generators Association says ISO-NE should adhere to a planned change to a sloped demand curve in the next Forward Capacity Auction (ER14-1639).

NEPGA has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to clarify a previous order that directed the RTO to continue the effort to eliminate the need for administrative pricing in zones that are short of generation resources or suffer from transmission constraints.

ISO-NE informed FERC in May that the complexities involved in switching to the sloped demand curve could not be resolved in time to “result in just and reasonable outcomes” in FCA 10, which is scheduled for Feb. 8, 2016. ISO-NE also cited the need to reconfigure the zones within the RTO to resolve transmission constraints identified since the last auction as an impediment to a timely resolution. (See ISO-NE Proposes New Capacity Zones for FCA 10.)

NEPGA suggests that FERC did not explicitly order a sloped zonal demand curve “only because it relied on ISO-NE’s commitment to file sloped zonal demand curves for commission review in advance of FCA 10.”

NEPGA is asking the commission to initiate a Section 206 proceeding and order ISO-NE to file the sloped zonal demand curves developed by the RTO and New England Power Pool stakeholders.

“Market participants have expected for over a year that their participation in FCA 10 would be based on both system-wide and zonal sloped demand curves. Clearing capacity resources on a curve better reflects the incremental value of capacity and leads to a more efficient market outcome,” NEPGA wrote.