Likely Sept. Return to Meeting in Person
NYISO hopes to return to holding in-person stakeholder meetings starting September 20, two weeks after staff is scheduled to return to work at the ISO building, CEO Rich Dewey told the Management Committee on Wednesday.
“I will offer the caveat that at least in some parts of the country, though not yet in the Capital District or New York generally, this new Delta variant is causing a significant rise in infections that has caught our attention,” Dewey said.
The ISO monitors the national situation daily and “will push that date back” if necessary for the health and safety of employees and market participants, he said.
“We’re not at that juncture yet, but we’re going to keep our eyes on that and will give people plenty of notice if we decide to change those dates,” Dewey said.
In a survey of market participants the ISO conducted about the return to in-person meetings, respondents were evenly split between those who want to restart in-person meetings immediately and more cautious respondents who would like to wait longer. Market participants will continue to have the option to join the meetings remotely in either case, he said.
In addition, because the conference center is set up with desks abutting each other, the ISO will require all participants to prove vaccination against COVID-19 in order to attend meetings in person.
Cost of Service Study
The NYISO Management Committee on Wednesday voted against (70.15%) conducting a new cost-of-service study in 2021/22 to evaluate the Rate Schedule 1 allocation between withdrawals and injections.
The ISO wanted to consider the RS1 impact of the most significant market design changes to be implemented since 2005, all concerned with integrating and optimizing renewable resources such as hybrid resources, co-located energy storage and large-scale solar, said Chris Russell, manager of customer settlement.
“Conducting a new cost-of-service study in 2021-2022 would help provide rate certainty for new entrants, as well as a more solid basis for NYISO cost recovery and budget planning,” Russell said.
Stakeholders resisted the idea, partly because they felt the resource mix is in such flux now that a study on the current RS1 allocation of 72% withdrawals and 28% injections would soon be out of date.
The most recent RS1 study done in 2010/11 was scheduled to be effective for a minimum of five years, through December 2016. Because the MC voted to decline conducting a study in 2016/17, a study would go forward in succeeding years unless the committee takes a required vote in the third quarter of each year to decline conducting such a study. The MC has voted against conducting a study every year since 2017.
Robert’s Rules of Order discourage the making of negative motions, thus stakeholders know this issue as the annual “yes means no” motion.
Metering Updates for Demand Side Resources
The MC also unanimously approved a tariff update to allow municipal electric utilities to provide metering and/or meter data services for demand side resources, and recommended that the NYISO Board of Directors authorize ISO staff to file such revisions with FERC under Section 205 of the Federal Power Act.
The update will be consistent with the ISO’s historical practices and in the future will also apply to distributed energy resources, said Alexis Hormovitis, distributed resources operations analyst.
NYISO has historically accepted demand-side resource meter data from transmission owners and meter data service providers, including municipal electric utilities.
In 2019, the ISO submitted the DER participation model tariff revisions to FERC, which modified the types of entities eligible to provide metering and meter data services.
NYISO said the revisions will close an unintended gap in its tariff and that it will continue to accept demand-side resource meter data from municipal electric utilities.