Regional Network Service Rate Increase

New England transmission owners have presented a regional network service (RNS) rate increase to $185 per kW-year for 2025, an increase over the $154 per kW-year rate in 2024.

The increase was explained by Jim Augelli of the Participating Transmission Owners Administrative Committee at a joint meeting of the NEPOOL Reliability and Transmission Committees (RC and TC) on Aug. 13. The rate stems largely from incremental revenue requirements and a true-up to account for under-collection in 2024, Augelli said.

David Burnham of Eversource Energy presented the RNS rate forecast for 2026/29, estimating the rate will increase from $185 per kW-year in 2025 to $217 per kW-year in 2029.

Asset condition projects are projected to account for nearly half of forecasted regional investments in 2024 at $814 million and are projected to increase to $965 million in 2025. Regional system plan projects are projected to cost $622 million in 2024 and $254 million in 2025.

Regional Energy Shortfall Threshold

On Aug. 14, ISO-NE provided an update on its work to develop a regional energy shortfall threshold (REST), which is intended to determine an acceptable level of load shed risk during extreme weather events, serving as a complement to the traditional one-day-in-10-years standard. (See ISO-NE Provides Update on Potential New Resource Adequacy Metric.)

The effort to improve upon traditional approaches based on one-in-10 loss of load expectations is part of a broader trend toward more advanced methods of evaluating shortfall risk.

In July, a working group convened by NERC and the National Academy of Engineering issued a report recommending NERC develop a “multi-metric approach” to supplement traditional loss-of-load expectation with expected unserved energy and loss-of-load hours, with a long-term eye at developing additional metrics.

“LOLE does not adequately account for the growing risk, over all hours, arising from increased variability and uncertainty caused by the evolving resource mix and increasing demand levels,” the report stated. (See Report Says New Energy Metrics Needed.)

Jinye Zhao of ISO-NE said the RTO still is assessing which extreme weather events should be used to evaluate shortfall risks.

Zhao said ISO-NE is ranking “all possible 21-day events based on average system risk” to identify those with the highest risk and will further evaluate event candidates by considering key system factors such as fuel inventories, prices and generator outages.

Mike Knowland of ISO-NE said there have been “no notable changes in ISO’s current thinking with regard to REST periodicity or REST metrics and thresholds” since the RTO’s update in May.

Votes

The RC voted to support conforming changes to ISO-NE planning procedure 5-6 associated with Order 2023 and Order 2023-A compliance.

Alex Rost of ISO-NE said additional changes may be needed to the planning procedures after the start of the transitional cluster study but prior to the start of the first cluster study.

The RC also voted to support revisions to Operating Procedure (OP) 12, which relates to voltage and reactive control. The revisions stemmed from the periodic review process and would affect voltage control options and voltage scheduling.

The committee also supported changes to OP-23 related to generator form submission rules for resource auditing.