California-based demand response provider OhmConnect is seeking NYISO’s approval to this summer begin enrolling small customer aggregations (SCAs) as special case resources (SCRs) in the ISO’s wholesale capacity market.
“All residences will be Con Ed customers located in NYISO Zones H, I, or J,” John Anderson, director of energy markets at OhmConnect, said Tuesday in presenting the SCA proposal to the ISO’s Installed Capacity/Market Issues/Price Responsive Load Working Group.
OhmConnect has enrolled over 250,000 residential customers into its various programs in CAISO, ERCOT and Australia.
Most SCA proposals that come before the working group are trying to address the problem of a lack of available metering data and to win approval for alternative metering methodologies, but OhmConnect’s New York customers all have advanced metering infrastructure or smart meters, and the aggregator obtains the customer data directly from Con Edison through their Share My Data platform, Anderson said.
“The challenge we face is instead a technical one in the NYISO demand response information system (DRIS), and simply stated, the system as currently configured cannot accommodate customers whose average coincident loads are smaller than 1 kW,” Anderson said.
OhmConnect has in fact already signed up several thousand residential customers, approximately half of whom are already participating in the ICAP program, he said.
“These customers are sufficiently large that we were able to enroll them directly in the program, and our focus here today with the SCA proposal is on the remaining half of our customer base that was too small to enroll directly due to the current DRIS design,” Anderson said.
An SCA proposal must be approved by at least four of the chairs and vice chairs of the NYISO Management Committee and Business Issues Committee, and the chairs of the ICAP and Price Responsive Load Working Groups. The approvals were to be requested from the applicable approvers by email after the meeting, said Ethan Avallone, NYISO distributed resources operations manager.
“This metering meets the NYISO’s expectations for the SCR program participation, and the ISO supports enrolling these resources as a small customer aggregation in the SCR program,” Avallone said.
OhmConnect will initiate the following sequence of actions upon notification from NYISO of a mandatory or test ICAP-SCR event to commence at hour T and with duration of N hours. | OhmConnect
The SCAs will consist of the curtailment from residential customers who will participate in the ICAP-SCR program, and OhmConnect intends for these customers to participate in the 2022 Summer Capability Period as early as July and is requesting multiple SCAs for each zone to accommodate future anticipated customer growth, Anderson said. NYISO rules prohibit any change to an SCA within a given capability period.
“When a customer enrolls and authorizes us access to their data, we can use the data to directly calculate performance of the resources in an SCA. We do not need to infer that performance, but can measure it directly,” Anderson said.
Asked about the effect of customers opting out of a DR event, Curtis Tongue, OhmConnect co-founder and chief strategy officer, said, “We typically see opt-out rates from our customers at about 1% or less per event, so in practice it ends up being a relatively negligible impact.”
Several market participants asked how NYISO will ensure that any additional SCA proposals, whether to serve different load zones or not, would employ the same methodology being approved in this process.
If the aggregator has the first proposal approved in one methodology and comes the next month with another proposal, “we would validate that they are doing the same exact methodology,” said Steven Gill, technical specialist on the ISO’s distributed resources operations team. “We have correspondence back and forth with [OhmConnect] that it’s the same exact methodology and load reduction plan, and the same exact intentions and way they’re going to deliver megawatts to the grid.”