NYISO last week presented the Budget and Priorities Working Group with its final recommended 2025 budget for in-house initiatives, showing that it responded to stakeholder feedback by reincluding several projects that had been cut.
The ISO’s initial recommendations last month cut several stakeholder favorites, including implementing storage as transmission and market purchase hub transactions. (See NYISO Presents Initial 2025 Project Budget Recommendation.)
“We took the feedback that we got from the initial recommendation, went back, and looked at the projects,” said Kevin Pytel, senior manager of product and project management for NYISO. “We have modified some of our estimates when we further scrutinized those estimates, trying to bring them down as much as possible for the resourcing.” This freed up some resources for other projects, he said.
Most of the projects that had been excised were reincluded by modifying their deliverables, which may change when they come fully online. Pytel explained that some of the changes were possible because NYISO produced new estimates of how many labor hours they would take.
“What you found in the past is that you’ve made conservative estimates, as in protecting yourselves: estimates of how much time projects would take and that they don’t take as much time as you estimate?” said Mark Younger of Hudson Energy Economics.
“That’s what the data suggests, Mark,” said Pytel.
Based on the recommended projects, NYISO estimates the total budget for 2025 to be $42.73 million — up from 2024’s $41.62 million — with $22.56 million for labor, $8.31 million for capital and $11.86 million for professional services.
In response to a stakeholder question, NYISO staff said the total cost is slightly higher than what it initially recommended, mostly because of a $500,000 increase in labor costs.
The Integrating Champlain Hudson Power Express project “could not fit into budget due to resource constraints,” NYISO said. The project aims to develop an operating protocol between Hydro-Quebec and the CHPE line, including identifying tariff revisions, software enhancements and integrating the facility to the system reliability tools. This would not impact the expected deployment in 2026, the ISO said. The line is expected to go into service that year.
The proposed budget is expected to be presented to the Management Committee at the end of this month, with a committee vote a month later and a Board of Directors vote in November.