Managing the often-at-odds priorities of affordability, reliability, and decarbonization will require a delicate balance of innovation, market reforms, and stability, industry experts said at the Northeast Energy and Commerce Association’s Power Markets Conference.

ISO-NE plans to decouple resource retirements from the capacity auction process and adopt a two-year notification timeline for retiring generators, the RTO told stakeholders at the NEPOOL Markets Committee.

ISO-NE’s multiyear effort to overhaul its forward capacity market likely will continue to dominate ISO-NE and NEPOOL work in 2025.

ISO-NE reiterated its plans not to include in its capacity auction reform project the development of ambient temperature modeling capabilities or a new simultaneous seasonal auction clearing engine.

As ISO-NE undertakes major capacity market accreditation reforms, New England storage developers are voicing concerns that potential flaws in the RTO’s modeling methodology could discourage new investments in storage resources.

ISO-NE presented the initial scope of its work to coordinate resource capacity accreditation improvements with proposed capacity market timing changes at the NEPOOL Markets Committee summer meeting.