The New York Public Service Commission on Thursday approved a slight increase to the amount of reserve resources that load-serving entities must have available for the upcoming capability year (07-E-0088).

The New York State Reliability Council (NYSRC) had in December proposed raising the installed reserve margin from 19.6% to 20% for the 2023/24 capability year, which begins May 1 (05-E-1180). The figure equates to an installed capacity requirement of 120% of forecasted peak load for the year.

The council told the PSC it based its decision on the addition of 549.3 MW of wind generation and the need to maintain 350 MW of operating reserves during load shedding. It calculated the figure using the GE MARS system to examine factors such as demand uncertainty and scheduled or forced outages to establish a value above forecasted peak such that the loss-of-load expectation from resource deficiencies is fewer than 0.1 event days per year on average.

NYISO supported the proposal, as its own analyses yielded an IRM of 19.9%; 20% was “within a range of reasonable IRM levels that will maintain reliability.”

The PSC also said that the adopted IRM will “not have a significant adverse impact on the environment.”

The NYSRC will re-evaluate the IRM before the end of the year and submit another value should conditions change.