NYISO on Oct. 28 presented additional data to the Budget and Priorities Working Group explaining its reasoning for rolling the remaining funds from this year’s budget cycle into a Rate Schedule 1 carryover. (See “Proposed RS1 Carryover for 2025 Increases,” NYISO Working Group Meeting Briefs: Oct. 1-2, 2024.)

CFO Cheryl Hussey explained that paying down NYISO’s fixed interest debt would incur significant fees that would “potentially outweigh the benefit of early repayment.”

“2024 is the next budget facility year that we could make earlier payments on, and the $7.35 million that we have left is essentially the maximum that we could pay down on the 2024 budget facility,” said Hussey. “And then we have about $150,000 in interest savings in 2027.”

Hussey said that because the payment would occur in 2025, it would also represent “a little over half a million dollars” in interest savings that were not currently estimated in the budget.

In a separate presentation, Hussey reviewed updates to NYISO’s draft 2025 Corporate Incentive Goals. Whether the ISO meets the goals affects employee compensation, incentivizing them to be completed, with bonuses for earlier completion. Most of the goals were unchanged from 2024, with some exceptions.

Goal 6B, “Key Project Initiatives,” identified eight projects that NYISO believes are critical to complete in 2025:

• • investigating whether changes are needed to the capacity market;
  • upgrading the hardware that NYISO software runs on;
  • developing design specifications and tariff changes needed for the Champlain Hudson Power Express transmission line with Hydro-Quebec;
  • developing the software specifications for integrating dynamic reserves;
  • developing the software design specifications for FERC Order 2222 compliance;
  • finishing the market design for the Winter Reliability Enhancements project;
  • migrating off-the-shelf and internally developed applications to the cloud; and
  • improving the interconnection study process by upgrading SalesForce software to implement an “interconnection portal” and meeting a FERC order to implement a heatmap.