Commodities 2021: Long-term energy security initiative among ISO-NE's top 2021 priorities

New York — ISO New England in 2021 will continue to hone its Energy Security Initiative, work on transmission planning for the clean energy transition and evaluate impacts of shifting peak loads.

The ISO is working on a long-term Energy Security Initiative, or ESI, that involves creating new ancillary service market products, among other initiatives. The grid operator is planning to "go-live" with an ESI day-ahead ancillary services product in June 2024 and will work over the next few years to complete all design, technical, and implementation/integration details, according to ISO-NE's 2021 Annual Work Plan.

Getting approval from federal regulators for the core design of the day-ahead ancillary services initiative is a key priority, the ISO said.

Subject to that approval, ISO-NE is continuing to prepare and advance the additional components of ESI, that include developing a market power mitigation framework, a seasonal forward market construct and detailed market design and associated rule changes.

The grid operator will conduct a stakeholder process to develop and file final market power assessment and mitigation rules in 2021, according to the work plan.

Additionally, the ISO "is targeting late 2021 to have further discussions with stakeholders on its developments for a seasonal forward market that complements the ESI day-ahead ancillary services," ISO-NE said.

Transmission planning

In 2021, ISO-NE will also consider and discuss with stakeholders proposed transmission planning refinements that better reflect long-term trends, such as increased amounts of distributed-energy resources, renewable resources and energy storage.

The effort will involve evaluating differing load levels, times of day, and times of year based on changing resource-mix characteristics, the ISO said. Data collection will need to be expanded to include increased data on load and DERs from distribution owners, to accurately model the system, according to the work plan.

Pending resource mix changes in ISO-NE territory can be seen by evaluating the interconnection queue, which is like a waiting list for new generation resources and transmission projects.

Solar power capacity dominates new generation capacity additions for 2021 with about 1.3 GW compared with around 19 MW of onshore wind power capacity.

Further out, however, considering all years of ISO-NE generation queue data, offshore wind dominates with almost 15 GW of capacity compared to just under 3 GW of solar capacity and 466 MW of solar plus batteries. There is also a comparatively small volume of onshore wind capacity of 225.6 MW, according to ISO-NE data.

Importantly, not all resources that submit interconnection queue requests are ultimately built, but the data paints a picture of the types of generation resources developers are looking to add to regional grids.

Power demand shifts

The summer daily peak is shifting to later in the day, and as a result, the ISO is reviewing the effect of projected behind-the-meter solar photovoltaics growth on net peak loads "to determine if changes are warranted to how the region's capacity requirements are calculated or how resources' reliability contributions are measured," the work plan said.

In addition, ISO-NE is conducting an initial study of effective load carrying capability, or ELCC, to analyze the capacity value of adding renewable generation and energy storage resources. PJM Interconnection is conducting a similar initiative given the growth of renewables in its energy and capacity markets.

"ELCC is a dynamic method for measuring resources' contribution to reliably serving load and could play an important role for planning and markets as the resource mix evolves," ISO NE said.

Early stages of these analyses began in 2020 and will continue through 2021, the ISO said.