In a wide-ranging letter dated April 30, four U.S. senators called for improved transparency and accountability from ISO-NE and asked the RTO to increase its facilitation of the clean energy transition.   

Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) applauded ISO-NE’s “ongoing progress on transparency, longer-term transmission planning and resource accreditation,” but said more changes are needed. 

“ISO-NE must address issues of governance with increased accountability and transparency, strategically build out transmission capacity and reshape the ISO-NE market structures that have a history of unfairly subsidizing existing fossil fuel generation,” the senators wrote, requesting a written response by May 10. 

The letter was led by Markey, a frequent critic of ISO-NE. In 2023, Markey introduced a bill to increase the transmission planning and transparency requirements for RTOs, which was endorsed by several environmental organizations. (See Dems Introduce Bill on Transmission Planning, RTO Transparency.) 

ISO-NE spokesperson Mary Cate Colapietro said the RTO is preparing a response to the letter and added that it remains focused on reliability and “managing wholesale electricity markets that will support the new technologies and industry innovations necessary to serve all New Englanders now and in the future.”  

Governance Recommendations

The senators urged ISO-NE to diversify its board of directors to better represent consumer, climate and environmental justice perspectives. They also called on ISO-NE to allow stakeholders to vote on individual candidates for the board, instead of just a single proposed slate of candidates.  

The board also should open its meetings to the public and make efforts to incorporate community feedback and questions into their proceedings, the senators added.  

The senators also criticized the voting structure within NEPOOL, noting that state consumer advocates “hold less than 2% of the voting power in NEPOOL.” 

While commending ISO-NE’s agreement to hire a policy adviser focused on community engagement and environmental justice, the senators asked ISO-NE to develop a larger environmental justice team “to uplift lived experiences, account for social costs and benefits, and align with larger environmental justice priorities.”  

The senators also asked ISO-NE to “engage more deeply with the ISO-NE Consumer Liaison Group (CLG) to ensure that public interest is a core tenet of all future decisions and policies.”  

Following the election of a group of climate activists to the CLG’s coordinating committee in December 2022, ISO-NE has seen strong participation — and faced increased criticism — at CLG meetings. (See Climate Activists Take Over Small Piece of ISO-NE.)

Interactions between ISO and NEPOOL officials and climate activists at the CLG at times have been testy. Activists have argued ISO-NE and NEPOOL are biased toward fossil fuel interests and aren’t doing enough to facilitate decarbonization, while ISO-NE has stressed that it must remain fuel-neutral and is constrained by federal and state policy.  

An April 1 letter to ISO-NE by two NEPOOL members criticized members of the CLG coordinating committee for advocating for climate action and urged ISO-NE to prohibit the committee from “lobbying from within.” 

The letter was written by Lisa Linowes, executive director of the Industrial Wind Action Group, an antirenewables advocacy organization, and William Short, a consultant representing multiple companies at NEPOOL.  

“If this level of advocacy persists, we would argue that the CLG be abolished,” Linowes and Short argued. 

The senators urged board members and ISO-NE officials to “continue to participate in CLG meetings in order to fully assess and understand the impacts of its decisions on the communities it serves and who pay for its operation.” 

Market and Planning Recommendations

The senators called on ISO-NE to redouble its intra- and interregional transmission planning efforts, while praising the proposed cost-allocation framework for long-term transmission projects approved by the NEPOOL Participants Committee in early April. (See NEPOOL PC Supports Additional Delay of FCA 19.) 

“In partnership with state governments, ISO-NE should embrace a much more ambitious paradigm for interregional grid coordination and planning with neighboring balancing authorities on both sides of the border,” the senators wrote. 

Regarding ISO-NE’s in-development resource capacity accreditation (RCA) updates, the senators wrote that ISO-NE should “expand the scope of RCA to better reflect gas plant performance, and ensure accreditation values adequately incentivize the resources states’ policies demand to participate in the capacity markets.”  

The RCA updates likely will significantly change the revenue resources can earn in the capacity market. ISO-NE’s initial analysis indicated the updates would hurt the value of gas, oil and battery resources, and benefit wind, energy efficiency and hydro resources. (See NEPOOL Markets Committee Briefs: Feb. 6, 2024.) 

Despite recent efforts to enable smaller resources to participate in ISO-NE’s wholesale markets, stakeholders have argued the markets remain prohibitive to aggregations of distributed resources. (See ISO-NE CLG Highlights Importance of Demand Response.) 

The senators expressed their hope the capacity market changes will prevent expensive out-of-market agreements to preserve grid reliability and stressed that any future out-of-market arrangements must be based on “clear, cohesive and transparent evidence.”