Competitive Power Ventures’ proposal to revamp ISO-NE‘s financial assurance rules failed to win approval from NEPOOL’s Participants Committee on Thursday, spelling the end of an effort that struggled to get off the ground in the stakeholder process.
CPV’s plan to change the financial assurance (FA) rules for the region’s Forward Capacity Market was designed to penalize projects that fall well behind their construction schedules. (See NE Stakeholders Propose Retirement, Financial Assurance Changes). It would add increments of FA at certain milestones in the construction process as well as create new FA categories.
After several rounds of stakeholder meetings in recent months, including a failed vote at the Markets Committee in April, the proposal picked up support from the renewables group RENEW after adopting several of the group’s recommendations. RENEW said the latest iteration “strikes a good balance between creating incentives to encourage market entry only when projects are sufficiently confident of success while not creating a barrier to entry for any size or type of new resource.”
But at the last hurdle, Thursday’s PC meeting, the proposal again fell short with 64.74% voting in favor when the motion needed 66.67% to pass.
The issue is not likely to go away after the Killingly Energy Center’s disruption of Forward Capacity Auction 16 spotlighted the question of financial assurance and project timelines.
Board Vote
In an executive session, the committee also voted on two nominees for the ISO-NE board.
One candidate was current board Chair Cheryl LaFleur, who is up for re-election, and the other is a new board member whose identity is being kept confidential until it is announced by ISO-NE. (See NEPOOL Participants Committee Briefs: April 7, 2022).
The grid operator’s board will vote next to approve the candidates.
Load Records
ISO-NE COO Vamsi Chadalavada informed the committee of several recent landmarks related to low minimum load caused by high solar penetration.
The grid operator set a new record low of 7,580 MW of minimum load on May 1, a low-demand Sunday featuring sunny skies and mild temperatures.
ISO-NE has this year already experienced 28 “duck curve” days in which daytime minimum load fell below overnight levels. (See New England’s Duck Curve Days Chart Solar Growth).
“New England’s power system is changing right in front of our eyes,” Chadalavada said in a press release on Thursday. “While these changes haven’t happened overnight, a day like May 1 is a good reminder of the progress New England has made in its transition to the future grid.”
OP and PP Changes
The PC also voted to approve changes to two operating procedures and one planning procedure that had previously been approved by the Reliability Committee, including:
- revisions to OP-14 (addition of a reference to NX-12 and an exemption for DNE Dispatchable Generators and Continuous Storage Facilities);
- revisions to OP-18 (edits resulting from biennial review — formatting and grammatical changes, updated references and terminology, and documentation of existing metering requirements for Alternative Technology Regulating Resources); and
- revisions to PP5-6 (revisions clarifying treatment of facility re-dispatch under certain specific circumstances within the interconnection study and voltage response when interconnecting Distributed Energy Resources).