NV Energy intends to join CAISO’s Extended Day-Ahead Market (EDAM), an official with the utility said May 31, notching a major win for the ISO in its competition with SPP’s Markets+ day-ahead offering in the West. 

The announcement confirms what multiple sources have recently told RTO Insider: that the Nevada-based utility had disclosed in private meetings that it had decided on the EDAM and would make that news public upon filing its integrated resource plan with the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada (PUCN). (See NV Energy to Join CAISO’s Extended Day-Ahead Market.) 

Speaking at a monthly meeting of the Launch Committee of the West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative, Dave Rubin, NV Energy’s federal energy policy director, acknowledged the accuracy of the press reports and said the utility submitted its IRP — which includes the request — to the PUCN that same day. 

“We will indicate NV Energy’s intention to request authorization from our commission later this year to join the EDAM,” said Rubin, who also is a member of the Launch Committee. 

Rubin said the Nevada process for joining a day-ahead market is different from some other Western states because state law requires a utility to obtain “formal authorization” from the utility commission to move forward with a market decision.

The decision is a key victory for the EDAM because NV Energy’s control area occupies a central position in CAISO’s Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM), providing a key corridor for wheel-throughs of energy between the market’s California participants — including the ISO — and PacifiCorp’s massive balancing authority area in the inland West. 

Brian Turner, a Pathways Launch Committee member who leads Advanced Energy United’s regulatory engagement in the West, called NV Energy’s decision to join EDAM a “big deal” based on the “critical mass” it brings and the overall “functioning of the grid.” 

NV Energy’s decision moves Nevada from “being on the periphery of a possible Markets+ to being at the center of what will come with EDAM,” Turner said in an interview. “So, it’s a very big deal that they’re joining.” 

The Brattle Group study released this year that showed NV Energy could earn as much as $149 million in benefits from participating in EDAM noted that the scale of the utility’s benefits is heavily correlated with the shape of the market footprint “due to its large amount of transfer capability and centrality” in the Western Interconnection.   

“NVE benefits tend to be higher when it is central to the market and facilitates transfers within the market,” the study found in assessing outcomes based on multiple footprints for both EDAM and Markets+. (See NV Energy to Reap More from EDAM than Markets+, Report Shows.) 

NV Energy’s decision in favor of EDAM also is significant for the work of the Pathways Launch Committee, which voted May 31 to advance step 1 of its CAISO governance proposal to the ISO’s stakeholder process. The proposal calls for CAISO to alter its tariff to elevate the “joint” authority the WEIM’s Governing Body currently shares with CAISO’s Board of Governors over WEIM matters to “primary” authority.  

Under the plan, the ISO would file that change with FERC only after the EDAM secures implementation agreements with a “set of geographically diverse” WEIM participants representing load equal to or greater than 70% of CAISO’s annual load in 2022.  

So far, only PacifiCorp has fully committed to signing such an agreement, but the EDAM also has solid commitments from Balancing Authority of Northern California, Idaho Power, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Portland General Electric. NV Energy’s commitment would position CAISO to trigger that change.