ISO-NE will publish the results of its capacity auction next week after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a stay retaining the capacity supply obligation of the Killingly Energy Center.
The grid operator confirmed its plans in a news release Tuesday, ending the uncertainty surrounding the capacity auction since it took place in early February. (See Killingly Uncertainty Could Delay Capacity Auction Results Another Month.)
ISO-NE has also begun plotting out the schedule for next year’s capacity auction, FCA 17, a process which has been delayed as well by the Killingly saga.
In a presentation to the NEPOOL Participants Committee on Thursday, ISO-NE Resource Qualification Manager Alex Rost said that activities for FCA 17 will start in April and that the auction will take place on March 6, 2023, a month later than usual.
The process will be compressed in at least two sections to make up for the lost time, Rost said.
That plan is not final, and ISO-NE said it’s asking market participants for feedback before it publishes the schedule.
Financial Assurance Proposal Update
Also at Thursday’s Participants Committee meeting, Competitive Power Ventures delayed a vote on its proposal to revamp New England’s financial assurance rules, adding new penalties for developers who miss key milestones. (See NE Stakeholders Propose Retirement, Financial Assurance Changes.)
The proposal, which has been discussed at several NEPOOL stakeholder meetings in the last few months, recently came under criticism from the renewable energy advocacy group RENEW Northeast.
RENEW wrote in a memo that the changes call for “excessive levels of Financial Assurance that would create an unnecessarily high burden for new entry, beyond what would be needed to incent the proper behavior.”
The group said it’s not opposed to increasing the required FA before each capacity auction, but that level should be a “careful balance” that doesn’t create overly punitive barriers for entry.
RENEW also challenged some of the language in CPV’s proposal as unclear. CPV is expected to revisit the proposal in other NEPOOL meetings over the next few weeks.
Consent Agenda
The committee also unanimously approved revisions to Planning Procedure No. 11 (Planning Procedure to Support Geomagnetic Disturbances) to conform to and support the requirements of NERC Reliability Standard TPL-007-4 (Transmission System Planned Performance for Geomagnetic Disturbance Events), as recommended by the Reliability Committee at its Feb. 15 meeting.