Joint Board/MC Resumes In-person
Following two years of remote meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic, the NYISO Board of Directors will resume in-person interactions with the Management Committee at their annual joint meeting scheduled for June 13, CEO Rich Dewey told the MC on Wednesday.
“This is really an important meeting for our Board of Directors to hear directly from market participants what the key concerns are; what their issues are,” Dewey said.
Discussion will focus on the ISO’s Grid in Transition initiative and what specific challenges market participants are encountering, Dewey said.
While many market participants have expressed intent to attend the event at the Sagamore Hotel on Lake George, COVID infection rates continue to be high in the capital region and New York state generally, so the ISO has procured a larger space than usual to allow for greater distance among participants and is planning most social activities for outdoors, he said.
“We’re going to send out some information encouraging people not to attend if they’re experiencing any symptoms and just be smart about taking care of themselves and each other as we get ready for an event like this,” Dewey said. “We do recognize that there are some individuals who might want to participate remotely, and we’re looking at how we might be able to accommodate that.”
Dewey closed his report with a reference to the March MC meeting, where he had briefed the participants on the ISO managing some atypically high staff vacancy rates. (See “Staffing Recruitment Improves,” NYISO Management Committee Briefs: March 30, 2022.)
“We’ve had two good recruiting months in a row, and we’ve been able to identify some really top talent that we brought into the organization, so the vacancy rate is down in the range of 9%, which is still a little bit higher than our budget, but we do have a healthy queue of individuals we plan to onboard in the next month,” Dewey said. “At least from a recruiting standpoint, things are trending in the right direction.”
Adequate Capacity for 2022 Summer
NYISO foresees having adequate generating capacity margins for normal weather conditions this summer, without emergency operating actions, but it would require emergency operating actions to varying degrees depending on the severity of extreme weather conditions, Vice President of Operations Aaron Markham reported.
“From a statewide perspective, we expect a surplus of about 2,000 MW for a baseline forecast without operating emergency operating actions, and that dwindles to an approximately 2,300-MW shortfall when we go all the way to the extreme 99-1 [once in 100 years] forecast conditions,” Markham said in presenting the Summer 2022 Capacity Assessment.
2021 and 2022 Summer Capacity Assessment and Comparison | NYISO
Last winter the ISO started including a 99-1 extreme forecast in its capacity assessment and plans to continue to do so to advise stakeholders of what that looks like, he said.
“We do have approximately 3,300 MW of emergency [resources], so when we take into account those, we do show positive margin for all of forecast conditions even up to 99-1 on a statewide basis,” Markham said.
Projected capacity margins for normal and extreme weather conditions without emergency operating actions:
- 1,918-MW capacity margin for 50-50 peak forecast conditions
- -382-MW capacity margin for 90-10 peak forecast conditions
- -2,287-MW capacity margin for 99-1 peak forecast conditions
Projected capacity margins for normal and extreme weather conditions with up to 3,294 MW of emergency operating actions:
- 5,212-MW capacity margin for 50-50 peak forecast conditions
- 2,912-MW capacity margin for 90-10 peak forecast conditions
- 1,007-MW capacity margin for 99-1 peak forecast conditions
The ISO is continuing to monitor energy supplies and prices based on global markets and events, and the weekly fuel survey process indicates that the prices for fuel will be higher this summer than in recent history, Markham said. Oil inventories for dual-fuel-capable units are lower than last year but still sufficient for starting the summer.
“We’ve done our normal coordination with the transmission and generator maintenance outages to ensure that, to the extent possible, any outages scheduled over the summer can be recalled on short notice to make sure that the resources are available to meet hot weather needs,” Markham said.