NYISO CEO Rich Dewey opened the Management Committee on Jan. 29 with a congratulations on getting through 2024 before looking ahead to the rest of 2025.
“We had a lot on our plate, very complicated matters that needed to be navigated through the stakeholder process. Sometimes contentious. Sometimes not,” Dewey said. “I do want to express my appreciation to stakeholders for continuing to work through the issues and tee us up for, I think, an equally challenging 2025.”
Dewey said his “first priority” is maintaining grid reliability. Load forecasting and managing uncertainties are going to be paramount as large loads continue to come online.
“Specific to this are the large loads that we’ve seen based on economic development, or some of the AI-driven, business-centric data center applications that can pop up pretty quickly,” Dewey said. “Managing that and making sure we’ve got a good, reliable system to deal with those uncertainties is going to be a big part of our forecasting team’s priorities.”
He went on to say that the 2024 Reliability Needs Assessment would “transition forward” to the Comprehensive Reliability Plan this year. In all its reliability, planning and forecasting, NYISO is facing challenging levels of uncertainty, and new, innovative methods will be needed to address it, he said.
Dewey said meeting the needs of the system would require looking at the market structures, rules and planning processes in place to ensure that they continue to provide reliability through appropriate market signals. He pointed to the complexities of 2024’s Demand Curve Reset, saying the ISO had heard the feedback from stakeholders and was committed to examining the design principles of the capacity market. (See related story, FERC Accepts NYISO Demand Curve Reset.)
This will occur alongside the monumental shift in transition planning required by FERC Order 1920. NYISO is going to have to balance this new long-term regional transmission planning regime while working through the inaugural state Coordinated Grid Planning Process. Dewey said this would require a “tremendous amount of work” in 2025 to meet the needs of stakeholders and position the ISO for an uncertain future.
“I believe we’ve got some of the leading markets, if not the leading markets, in the nation,” Dewey said. But with all the new technologies and transitions occurring industry wide, “we need to continue to stay out ahead of that.”
Operations Report and Winter Reliability
The committee also heard COO Emilie Nelson’s report on December 2024’s market performance. The average locational-based marginal price was $73.20/MWh, which was higher than the $36.26/MWh for November 2024 and $33.67/MWh for December 2023.
Both the day-ahead and real-time load-weighted LBMPs were higher than in the previous month. The average year-to-date monthly cost was $44.67/MWh, up 14.2% over December 2023. This correlates with higher sendouts, 432 GWh/day on average compared to 377 GWh/day in November. Natural gas prices were also higher.
“I’d like to call out that, of course, we had some pretty significant cold temperatures last week, spanning [Jan. 20 to 22],” Nelson said. The peak load was 23,521 MW and occurred Jan. 22, a Wednesday.
She expressed her gratitude for the communication across the cold-stressed system.
“Although the neighboring control areas were also operating through tight system conditions, all areas were projected [to achieve,] and then realized, reliable operation,” Nelson said. “It was a situation where the coordination of power flows provided greater regional reliability.”