On this matter van Welie asserted that the cost for ISO-NE’s fossil fueled reliability services reflected wholesale market prices, but he ignored the point that those services would prove a waste of ratepayer funds on obsolete technology with impending stranded costs.
In their letter, the senators saw red over recent market rule changes forcing “state-sponsored renewable energy to wait for incumbent fossil fuel generators to retire” before allowing clean resources into the capacity market and the Inventoried Energy Program. Any other cuts then were born of state driven energy efficiency standards, and demand response and renewable energy programs. But the market accomplished the reductions when lower costs for natural gas all but ended coal burning – the greatest greenhouse gas emitting fuel for generating electricity. First, he declared ISO-NE kept the lights on while “achieving” dramatic emission reductions in New England’s electricity markets over the past two decades. Van Welie responded to the Senate delegation in a long, ISO-aggrandizing letter.
ISO NEW ENGLAND HOW TO
Van Welie had ignored the New England states’ objective to decarbonize the bulk power system – the wholesale markets – after agreeing more than three years earlier on a “process to discuss how to integrate climate change policies” into electricity markets under ISO-NE purview. In their letter to van Welie, the senators excoriated him for ISO-NE’s pursuing “a patchwork of market reforms aimed at preserving the status quo of a fossil fuel resource mix” in the Forward Capacity Market for winter grid reliability and in the Inventoried Energy Program for fuel security.
ISO NEW ENGLAND ISO
As it happened, its regulator, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, had previously directed the ISO to file changes to its energy-security markets by April 2020.
ISO-NE runs the region’s wholesale electricity markets. senators wrote Gordan van Welie, president and CEO of the Independent System Operator of New England (ISO-NE). Access to more granular grid state information has allowed ISO-NE power system engineers to improve power system models and analytical techniques, enhancing the overall reliability of the ISO-NE system.Not for nothing, late last year a super majority of New England’s U.S. ISO-NE has already used this technology to increase power system engineers visibility into bulk power system conditions in near-real time and enabled the potential for earlier detection of disturbances that could result in instabilities or cascading outages.
ISO NEW ENGLAND SOFTWARE
ISO-NE is exploring a long-term plan for operations where advanced transmission management software will assist in determining real-time grid stability margins. These devices, in conjunction with a set of new applications, have the potential to improve the reliability of the transmission grid and to prevent the spread of local disturbances to neighboring regions through enhanced monitoring capabilities and increased situational awareness. ISO-New England (ISO-NE) and seven of its transmission owners have installed phasor measurement units (PMUs) and phasor data concentrators (PDCs) across the six states in the New England control area.