By William Opalka
New York’s generators have appealed to the NYISO Board of Directors to reject a rule change that would effectively cap capacity payments received by generators in a constrained zone.
The Independent Power Producers of New York filed its appeal Nov. 1 seeking to overturn the Management Committee’s Oct. 25 vote capping capacity payments in the Lower Hudson Valley and New York City zones to protect consumers from higher prices. (See NYISO OKs Capacity Export Fix Over Generators’ Opposition.)
Responses to IPPNY’s appeal are due Nov. 8; the board is expected to take up the appeal at its next meeting on Nov. 14-15.
Supporters of the rule change concede that the cap is not justified by any analysis done by NYISO staff.
“Because [the cap] is unsupported, will distort market signals, will harm reliability and will set a dangerous precedent that will embolden load interests to use the stakeholder process rather than the competitive markets based on sound and efficient market design to set prices, it cannot be found to be just and reasonable,” the petition says.
The appeal will be a “paper proceeding” unless a party requests oral arguments, NYISO spokesman David Flanagan told RTO Insider on Friday. “No such request has been received at this time,” Flanagan said.
The proposed rule change is in response to FERC’s Oct. 17 order accepting ISO-NE’s changes to its annual capacity reconfiguration auctions. The motion was carried with a 63% vote in favor, above the required supermajority of 58%.
FERC’s ruling allows Castleton Commodities International’s 1,242-MW Roseton 1 generator, located 43 miles north of New York City in NYISO’s capacity import-constrained G-J locality, to supply 511 MW of its capacity to ISO-NE beginning next June for the 2017/18 delivery year.
Appeals of committee motions are rare and reversals are even rarer. According to the NYISO website, there have been 28 appeals since 2000, with 20 being denied, three motions reversed and five sent back to either the committee or staff for further action.