WESTBOROUGH, MA — Boston leads large, northeastern cities in economic growth, outpacing both New York and Philadelphia in payroll employment, Moody’s Analytics economist Ed Friedman told the ISO-NE Planning Advisory Committee on Thursday.

According to figures compiled by Moody’s from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Boston posted better than 2% growth in payroll employment for the three months ending September 2017, compared to approximately 1.7% growth in Philadelphia and less than 1.5% in New York City.

“The job growth in Boston is quite strong and significantly above the U.S. pace, which is around the 1.5% mark,” Friedman said.

Friedman characterized New England job creation in the aggregate as “slow but steady” at 1% per year and said that housing price gains in the region are mostly keeping up with the national average of just more than 6% for the year ending in August 2017. Of the six states in the region, only New Hampshire and Massachusetts exceeded the national average; housing prices in Massachusetts, where health care remains a strong economic driver, increased by almost 7%.

Both Connecticut and Vermont lost population in the past two years. Nonetheless, Moody’s expects economic growth in the region to continue in 2018 at about 1.3%, with “some deceleration consistent with the demographic challenge” of lost population, Friedman said.

RTO Readies Maine Resource Integration Study

ISO-NE on Thursday presented a draft of its Maine Resource Integration Study to the PAC, its first transmission planning study to employ queue clustering under Tariff revisions approved by FERC in October (ER17-2421). The changes, effective Nov. 1, allow the RTO to consider interconnection requests and upgrade cost allocations in groups rather than individually. (See FERC Approves ISO-NE Queue Clustering.)

The Northern and Western Maine grid was built to serve the small loads in the area and lacks capacity for the more than 5,800 MW of proposed new resources, mostly wind, that have filed interconnection requests. The 5,800 includes duplicate requests.

The resource integration report will provide the basis for system impact and facilities studies, which will identify the upgrades required for resources that proceed to interconnection and their cost allocations, said Al McBride, ISO-NE director of transmission strategy and services.

Maine 2027 Needs Assessment Moves Forward

The RTO’s draft Maine 2027 Needs Assessment study is ready for stakeholder comment, Jinlin Zhang, ISO-NE lead engineer for transmission planning, told the PAC.

Comments and notifications by proponents of state-sponsored requests for generation should be submitted to pacmatters@iso-ne.com by Dec. 3.

The study identifies reliability-based needs in Maine for the year 2027, considering future load distribution, resource changes in New England based on Forward Capacity Auction 11 results, and 2017 solar and energy efficiency forecasts.

Planners look at reliability over a range of generation patterns and transfer levels, how the study coordinates with the New Hampshire Needs Assessment, and all applicable NERC, Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC) and RTO transmission planning reliability standards.

The completed draft report and intermediate study files will be presented to the PAC in the first quarter of 2018.

RTO Begins Zone Planning for FCA 13

ISO-NE has begun assessing transmission transfer capability, generation retirements and new resources to set capacity zone boundaries ahead of FCA 13 for 2022/23.

The process includes evaluation of the zones as determined for FCA 12, McBride said.

Each year, the RTO must identify weaknesses and limiting facilities that could impact the transmission system’s ability to reliably transfer energy in the planning horizon. Any new boundaries require a filing with FERC, McBride said.

The process of certifying transmission projects begins in October and is coordinated with that month’s Regional System Plan (RSP) Project List update to ensure consistency. Transmission owners are required to provide models and contingency definitions. The RTO will determine certifications by January; the list of certified projects will be presented at the January Reliability Committee meeting.

Transmission upgrades identified for Southeast Massachusetts/Rhode Island (SEMA/RI) are not expected to change the boundaries of the area. Planners do not expect such upgrades to be fully certified for FCA 13, nor will transfer limits be updated in time for that auction in 2019.

Any major resource retirements received for FCA 13 will be considered in the zone formation process, McBride said. No major retirements were received for FCA 12.

Time-Sensitive Tx Needs Determination

Pradip Vijayan, ISO-NE senior transmission planning engineer, made a presentation on how the RTO identifies time-sensitive transmission upgrades — those required within three years and thus not subject to the competitive solicitation process.

RTO officials consider when an upgrade will be required after identifying improvements in a needs assessment.

Needs identified from a short-circuit analysis are considered time sensitive unless they are driven by future projects that have an in-service date beyond three years of the completion of the needs assessment.

Steady-state needs observed at off-peak load levels are considered time sensitive. Those seen at peak load levels may or may not be time-sensitive.

The RTO will add a document detailing the process to its Transmission Planning Technical Guide, Vijayan said.

Tx Planning Assumptions Update

ISO-NE is continuing to update the probabilistic methodology and minimum load level used in its transmission planning assumptions, Director of Transmission Planning Brent Oberlin said.

The generator dispatches used in base cases in his report showed the potential for a significant number of generators to be simultaneously unavailable, especially in the Eastern Connecticut (ECT) area. ISO-NE said in October that it would revise the scope of its 2027 needs assessments for ECT, Southwest Connecticut and New Hampshire over stakeholder questions about dispatch modeling assumptions. (See “Tx Planners Rethink 2027 Needs Assessment,” ISO-NE Planning Advisory Committee Briefs: Oct. 18, 2017.)

The ECT data showed that up to 488 MW of generation could be unavailable at peak load. The largest generator in the ECT study area is Montville 6 (413 MW), with 13 other generators totaling only 253 MW, which shows that the presence of a single large generator in an area with a low number of smaller generators can skew the results, Oberlin said.

The new methodology solves the issue by recalculating the upper limit of generation outages using the probabilistic method by excluding the large generator for dispatches in which it is assumed in service. By applying this method to ECT, the maximum amount of generation unavailable is limited to 115 MW in cases with Montville 6 in service.

The new methodology lowers the minimum load level to 8,000 MW from 8,500 MW, correcting an error on the handling of Maine mill loads (currently 320 MW) in the evaluations, Oberlin said.

— Michael Kuser