Participants in CAISO’s Extended Day-Ahead Market likely would remain subject to the market’s daily resource sufficiency evaluation even if they joined a new resource adequacy program that’s being crafted, developers of the new RA program said.

“The idea is it takes you right up to the doorstep of EDAM RSE. And then you participate in EDAM as designed,” said Jon Olson, director of energy trading and contracts at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD).

The group developing the RA program is open to “some kind of swapping of RSE or potential obligations,” said Olson, who noted one goal of the program is to avoid the need for EDAM tariff adjustments.

Olson, along with Ben Faulkinberry of PacifiCorp, gave a presentation on the potential new RA program during a March 16 meeting of CAISO’s Western Energy Markets (WEM) Regional Issues Forum.

Participants in the RA project are PacifiCorp, Portland General Electric, Public Service Company of New Mexico, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, NV Energy, the Turlock Irrigation District and the Balancing Authority of Northern California — of which SMUD is a member. The group is “self-organized,” Faulkinberry said, with CAISO involved as a technical consultant.

The group plans to release a draft design document in April. Faulkinberry said the document will leave “plenty of space for regional input.”

“Our intention was never to come out of the door with a fully baked, fully designed program,” said Faulkinberry, who is senior originator in PacifiCorp’s energy supply business unit.

WRAP Alternative

The new resource adequacy program is seen as an alternative to Western Power Pool’s Western Resource Adequacy Program (WRAP).

Participants in the day-ahead market competing with EDAM — SPP’s Markets+ — will be required to join WRAP. EDAM members also may join WRAP, but some expected EDAM participants have expressed concerns about the program and decided to withdraw. (See PacifiCorp Next to Leave WRAP After Raising Concerns.)

A variety of RA programs isn’t a problem for EDAM. CAISO has described the EDAM resource sufficiency evaluation as a “universal adaptor that connects entities with varying resource adequacy programs to efficiently commit/dispatch resources.”

Faulkinberry said the new RA program might appeal to utilities in Oregon, where jurisdictional entities must comply with state resource adequacy rules or participate in a qualifying regional program. The new RA program could become one such qualifying program.

One of the new RA program’s guiding principles is to use transmission connectivity within the EDAM footprint to allow capacity savings for customers. Market dispatch would be used for RA resource delivery, “so that the whole breadth and depth of the regional footprint could ensure that entities received megawatts when they needed them the most,” Faulkinberry said.

Other guiding principles include minimizing administrative burdens and having a common capacity counting standard, with ways to incentivize compliance.

Voluntary Offering

The RA program would be a voluntary offering, with an option for participants to withdraw if they feel it’s not working.

The group has been discussing a bevy of topics, such as methodology for capacity counting and load forecasts, transmission requirements, cure options if there’s a deficiency, binding-phase timing, transparency and ways to “instill trust in each other’s showings,” Faulkinberry said.

The presentation to the WEM Regional Issues Forum followed a March 7 letter that RA program developers sent to the CAISO WEM Body of State Regulators, outlining how the program could take shape. (See EDAM Utilities Moving to Develop RA Program.)

Following release of the draft design document, the group plans to solicit stakeholder feedback and issue a revised design document in the fall. That document then would be handed off to the Regional Organization for Western Energy (ROWE).

ROWE’s newly formed Formation Committee is scheduled to discuss the RA program March 19.