December Operations Report

NYISO updated the Operating Committee on the December snowstorm’s impact on grid operations, highlighting a particularly sharp shortfall in scheduled generation on Christmas Eve.

ISO Vice President of Operations Aaron Markham said that at one point that day 2,600 MW of generation scheduled in the day-ahead market failed to show up in real-time. (See FERC, NERC Set Probe on Xmas Storm Blackouts.)

He also said that Dec. 24 saw the winter season’s peak load to date, reaching 22,004 MW.

Regionally, conditions were tight, particularly in PJM, which experienced significant outages, resulting in NYISO having to facilitate emergency energy purchases and deliveries from both ISO-NE and IESO in Canada to PJM.

NYISO staff plan to return to the OC in March with a comprehensive report on Winter Storm Elliot’s full impact on the New York Control Area, focusing on what caused outages, where production was reduced and what corrective actions need to be taken.

Howard Fromer, who represents the Bayonne Energy Center, asked whether the storm caused load to significantly deviate from ISO forecasts.

Markham responded that about 500 MW of committed resources may have underperformed in real-time but that was not significantly impactful.

ICAP Demand Curve Updates

Stakeholders approved final results for locational minimum installed capacity requirements (LCRs), net cost of new entry curves and transmission security limit (TSL) floors for the 2023/24 capability year. (See ‘Final LCR Results,’ NYISO Stakeholders Still Concerned About DER Participation Model.)

Yvonne Huang, NYISO resource adequacy manager, said updates to the modeling and methodology from last year included adopting GE’s dynamic energy limited resource functionality, maintaining 350 MW of operating reserves during load-shedding events, adopting new load shapes based on data from more recent years and considering generator outages in the TSL calculations to better align with methodology used in ISO planning studies.