NEPOOL’s senior stakeholder committee Thursday signed off on a plan to delay the elimination of ISO-NE’s minimum offer price rule (MOPR), which the RTO abruptly threw its support behind last week after months of working on a different proposal that would have removed the contentious rule immediately.

The debate over the plan initially put forward by generators Calpine and Dynegy, which ISO-NE can now submit to FERC, is the latest volley in a long-running dispute over the effects of a rapid transition to renewables on the reliability of the region’s grid.

The MOPR sets a price floor for bids into the capacity market, designed to prevent what its backers say are “artificially” low prices caused by the participation of state-supported resources.

ISO-NE said that its backing of the two-year transition away from the MOPR, rather than immediate removal, is designed to slow the entry of state-sponsored resources into the capacity market to a “steady pace” rather than a “sudden, voluminous and permanent shift.” (See In Late Twist, ISO-NE Calls for 2-Year Delay on MOPR Elimination.)

The grid operator has worried that reliability of New England’s grid could suffer from a rapid influx of sponsored resources and an exodus of existing generators.

“What I know, based on what we’ve observed and studied and seen, is that a transition offers the most measured way forward … and gives us much-needed time to put in place critical reforms,” ISO-NE COO Vamsi Chadalavada told stakeholders at the Participants Committee meeting Thursday. “We are convinced of this position and this judgment, and we do need your support, because the best way for us to move forward is collectively, rather than arguing back and forth about what’s right and what’s wrong.”

The transition plan was backed by generation, transmission and supplier sectors in the NEPOOL vote Thursday. It’s also not opposed by five of the six New England states (with New Hampshire as the outlier because the state opposes MOPR removal altogether).

But renewable developers, advocates and environmental groups have cried foul, arguing that the RTO has not made its case convincingly that the transition is necessary for reliability.

“The ISO provided no quantitative support … that deviating from its blueprint established nine months earlier to impose a delay will reduce reliability risks,” the nonprofit RENEW Northeast wrote in a memo this week, also noting that “temporary programs have a habit of being extended.”

“The grid operator’s saying we’re not going to allow new clean energy resources to fairly compete in the region’s market until almost the end of the decade,” Bruce Ho, senior advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview. “That’s pretty extreme and really doesn’t seem in line with what [FERC] has been pushing for.”

Joe Curtatone, president of the Northeast Clean Energy Council, took to Twitter to slam the MOPR transition proposal.

“Much of what shapes our energy supply and the fate of our climate takes place in meetings few people know about, like at NEPOOL today,” the former Somerville, Mass., mayor wrote. “There’s a rule that forces clean energy to submit higher bids that protect fossil fuel suppliers. It’s grimy insider baseball, and it needs to stop.”

The transition plan does allow for up to 700 MW of capacity from state-subsidized resources to enter the market through a renewable technology resources (RTR) exemption in Forward Capacity Auctions 17 and 18 (300 MW in FCA 17 and 400 MW in FCA 18). And the committee approved an amendment from RENEW Northeast that would carry over any unused megawatts between those two years.

The plan now faces an uncertain future at FERC.

Members of the commission’s Democratic majority, Chairman Richard Glick and Commissioner Allison Clements, wrote recently that the MOPR makes ISO-NE’s tariff unjust and unreasonable, and that the RTO should move forward “expeditiously” with eliminating it. (See FERC Weighs in as ISO-NE Prepares for Capacity Auction.)

A FERC spokesperson said that Glick “does not want to risk prejudging the matter” and will wait for an official filing before the commission to comment on the ISO-NE proposal.

“What ISO-NE is proposing doesn’t seem to align with what commissioners are asking the grid operator to do,” Ho said. “I think we saw very clearly from the chairman … that he expects ISO New England to get rid of the unjust and unreasonable MOPR rule.”

Consent Agenda

The Participants Committee also approved three items on its consent agenda:

• changes to the resource retirement process to allow retirement bids to be updated later in order to give generators more flexibility, proposed by Calpine and recommended by the Markets Committee last month. (See NEPOOL Markets Committee Briefs: Jan. 12, 2022.)
• biennial review revisions to ISO-NE Operating Procedure No. 5 (Resource Maintenance and Outage Scheduling) Appendices A (Operable Capacity Calculations) and B (Outage Request Form), as recommended by the Reliability Committee.
• revisions to Appendix G (Designated Blackstart Resource Commitment) to OP-11 (Blackstart Resource Administration), as recommended by the RC.