Speaking on a panel at the quarterly meeting of ISO-NE’s Consumer Liaison Group on Thursday, the always outspoken Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy and climate program, did not mince words.

For more than 20 years, ISO-NE and NEPOOL have “essentially privatized public policymaking as private entities” through their respective administrations of the New England electric grid and stakeholder process, Slocum said. “There is inadequate transparency and accountability in these institutions that don’t reflect the public interest nature of what they’re doing.”

The Consumer Liaison Group holds open public forums to help regional consumers understand what is happening at the RTO. Slocum told it that “sweeping” reforms are needed to improve transparency and accountability. Neither ISO-NE Board of Directors nor NEPOOL stakeholder meetings are open to the public.

Opening NEPOOL stakeholder meetings to the interested public, plus recording and transcribing them, would be a start. It should be followed by a responsive ISO-NE board and reorientation of the NEPOOL voting sectors to make it less than “totally utility centric.” Currently, stakeholders are broken into six weighted sectors: Generation, Transmission, Supplier, Alternative Resources, Publicly Owned Entity and End User.

“This has no realistic application to all of the people that are actually impacted by our electricity system,” Slocum said.

Echoing Slocum’s call for changes, Jolette Westbrook, director and senior attorney for energy markets and regulation at the Environmental Defense Fund, said there is one significant barrier for most people needed to be eliminated: the cost of participation. NEPOOL membership fees range from $500 for End Users to $5,000 for Generation, Transmission and Supplier members.

“I’m sorry, we just have to realize that what one entity can afford may not be affordable to others,” Westbrook said.

Rebecca Tepper, chief of the Energy and Telecommunications Division in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, said that although ISO-NE’s budget comes from collecting fees from market participants and ratepayers, “nobody seems to question the fact that we’re spending millions of dollars to have the utilities participate in these proceedings and customers pay for that.”

Tepper noted that governance of ISO-NE was one of the areas that the New England States Committee on Electricity identified in its vision statement in October 2020. In the follow-up report to the region’s governors in June, NESCOE noted that the agendas of ISO-NE board meetings “indicate governance and transparency discussion; however, no process has been convened or proposal advanced” with the states.

“One of the three things that the states had requested is the one that has not made much progress, or at least not to the outside world,” Tepper said. “I think it would be good to see that move forward and have some real dialogue about how the governance process can be more accommodating to people.”

Slocum said that a multistate RTO like ISO-NE faces different governance challenges than single-state grid operators, like CAISO and NYISO. Still, there are lessons to learn, especially with appointments to the board. CAISO had a similar board structure to ISO-NE until the Western energy crisis spurred the California State Legislature to give the governor power to appoint or remove CAISO board members.

“It’s a little more challenging to replicate that in New England, but it’s important to state that [CAISO] is seen as an active partner with the state’s ambitious climate and clean energy goals,” Slocum said.

There is often conflict between New England states’ policy goals and ISO-NE. Slocum said the way to align them is to have a board that is “directly accountable to either the states or to the communities within [the RTO’s] footprint.”

“This theoretical model that the ISOs came up with in the late ’90s to have a dispassionate board that is supposed to be directly responsive to the needs of folks within the ISO footprint has failed,” Slocum said. “We need to have a different governance structure that that has direct lines of accountability because that failure and lack of accountability is what’s driving most of the problems.”