In its last meeting of 2021 on Friday, the CAISO Board of Governors elected a new chair and vice chair and voted to fund new technology to settle billions of dollars in yearly market transactions.
The five board members continued their policy of rotating leaders annually, electing Vice Chair Ashutosh Bhagwat as chair and naming Governor Mary Leslie to take his place as vice chair.
Bhagwat, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who has served on the board since 2011, took over the top spot from Angelina Galiteva, whom colleagues praised for her leadership in difficult times. The first woman to chair the CAISO board, her term included the pandemic, the state’s struggle to prevent summer blackouts and a changeover in CEOs.
“You are the perfect chair to have led this effort because I think you brought a really nice warmth and understanding and vision to being chair, and I think it’s served us really well,” Leslie told her.
Galiteva responded, “Well, thank you. It was a pleasure to be the first woman chair. It was about time we had a woman chair at the ISO, and now we’ll have many more. It’s wonderful to see that now women are the majority on the board, which is also a first, so it has been it has been a very good period.”
Bhagwat lauded Galiteva for her work as an ambassador between the CAISO board and the Western energy community and asked her to continue with those efforts.
Accepting his new role, Bhagwat said, “I appreciate the confidence you’re showing in me, and I hope to live up to it.”
Settlement Upgrades
CAISO management requested a $15.6 million upgrade to CAISO’s settlement system, which handles billions of dollars in transactions annually and will likely handle more in the coming years as CAISO expands its Western Energy Imbalance Market.
“Every week, the ISO settles between $60 [million] and $219 million dollars of market transactions, and in 2020 that totaled $11.4 billion dollars,” Vice President for System Operations Dede Subakti and CFO Ryan Seghesio said in a memo to the board. “In order to achieve this, the ISO settlement team must process between 18 and 51 trade dates each week, as mandated by our tariff. This results in roughly 31,000 system files being published to 585 market participants weekly.”
The current system is aging, they said.
“It [now] takes between three and seven hours of work to process each trade date, leaving very little room for error,” they wrote. “As a result, the ISO is sometimes challenged to meet the tariff-defined statement publishing deadlines.”
“As we look toward a future with more market participants, new customer types, new market products and an expanded ISO footprint, it is time to address the shortcomings in the current settlement system,” they said. “Failing to do so would be too risky to the ISO and our stakeholders.”
The board unanimously approved the request.