RENSSELAER, N.Y. — Significant natural gas price spreads between Western and Eastern New York in 2016 led to New York City generation being “more economic than in recent years,” Pallas LeeVanSchaick of Potomac Economics, director of NYISO’s Market Monitoring Unit, told the ISO’s Business Issues Committee on May 17.
In presenting the 2016 State of the Market report, LeeVanSchaick said natural gas prices on the Transco Zone 6 pipeline, serving New York City, averaged $2.19/MMBtu, roughly halfway between Millennium Pipeline’s $1.46/MMBtu and Iroquois Zone 2 at $2.84/MMBtu.
Enhancing the Energy Market
The report makes several recommendations to enhance energy market performance, primarily to real-time market operations and capacity pricing. The real-time change would be to consider rules that would adequately compensate all resources that relieve congestion while factoring in performance and the marginal cost of maintaining reliability.
| Potomac Economics
LeeVanSchaick said 92% of real-time congestion on 345-kV lines into the city occurred when reserve units were not believed to be available.
The report also recommends implementing location-based marginal cost pricing of capacity, which would save tens of millions annually and reduce volatility of prices and requirements.
Looking Forward
On long-term investment signals, LeeVanSchaick said the MMU does not estimate new environmental costs going forward, such as dramatic changes in Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative costs. “We use price tails, old CAPEX [capital expenditures],” he said, repeatedly telling market participants that the report was based on publicly available data.
| Potomac Economics
LeeVanSchaick was questioned on renewable forecasts that show a higher-than-market $240/MW cost of new entry for offshore wind off Long Island. LeeVanSchaick said the CONE assumed a 30-mile cable; a project closer to shore would reduce the projected estimate. The report also assumes for generators a “modest recovery of revenues going forward,” based on forward prices.
Deficiencies in New Zone Creation Process
The report says that while the new capacity zone for the G-J Locality in Southeast New York (SENY) has greatly enhanced the efficiency of capacity market signals, the new zone took years to create after it was first needed. This delay saw capacity in Zones G, H and I fall by 21% from 2006 to 2013, even as the need for resources in the SENY interface became more apparent.
One problem with the process is it being based on the highway deliverability test criterion, which ignores the reliability issue that would justify the creation of a new capacity zone. This can lead to additional capacity being procured on the constrained side of a transmission bottleneck to meet the reliability needs of the load pocket. For example, a 1% increase in the local capacity requirements equated to a $1.30/kW-month increase in capacity prices given the 2013/14 demand curve for New York City.
The report cites the retirement of the Indian Point nuclear plant as a “salient example” of the problems that can arise from the shortcomings in the new zone creation process. If Indian Point retires in 2021, and it leads to resource adequacy violations for Eastern New York or the area south of the Upstate NY-Con Ed interface, the “process would not consider creating an additional zone for any time before 2025. In fact, it would not trigger the creation of a new zone at all if there are no highway deliverability constraints.”
The report recommends NYISO adopt “a dynamic framework where potential deliverability and resource adequacy constraints are used to pre-define a set of capacity interfaces and/or zones.”
CARMEL, Ind. — MISO has made two changes to its newest future scenario in its annual Transmission Expansion Plan, adding more renewables and possible nuclear retirements to capture distributed energy trends and distinguish them from a continued fleet future.
The RTO bumped up the renewable target on its distributed and emerging technologies future from 15% to 20% of total MISO energy by 2032, policy studies engineer Matt Ellis told stakeholders at the May 17 Planning Advisory Committee meeting. He said MISO plans to model a more aggressive solar maturity curve for the future in response to stakeholder requests for more solar additions in the model. The RTO will assume that in 15 years, two-thirds of all solar is distributed and located near the top 20 load buses in each local balancing authority. MISO’s three other MTEP 18 futures assume one-third of all solar is distributed.
Shelly-Ann Maye, representing Midwest Power Transmission Arkansas, asked how MISO settled on 20% renewable penetration in the fourth future.
Ellis explained that it examined projects lined up in the interconnection queue. “Renewable targets vary state by state, and [at] a bare minimum, our models will capture that, and that’s about 10% in the limited fleet change [future]. Historically, though, we find that renewables go beyond those renewable standards.”
Citing DTE Energy’s recent announcement that it intends to reduce its carbon output by 80% by 2040, ITC Holdings’ David Grover asked if MISO considered more aggressive low-carbon generation addition trends in the futures.
“If you look at goals that are announced and goals that are out there from large utilities, what’s the base? Are you starting from the base [fleet] or from what utilities have said that they’re going to do?” Grover asked.
Ellis said carbon-reduction modeling begins from the current fleet and carbon emission levels. “As these press releases come out, this is something we can look at,” Ellis said.
MISO will also now assume a top end of 5 GW of nuclear retirements in the distributed future, through the assumption that nuclear licenses renewals will not be granted unless the plant had a “recent and significant update.” It is the only future that will model possible nuclear retirements; the other three futures assume that the zero-emission reactors will continue running.
Some stakeholders asked if MISO considered that unprofitable nuclear plants will continue to be offered subsidies through state legislation. “I think it’s implicitly assumed, not explicitly assumed. That’s why we’re modeling anywhere from zero to 5 GW” of retirements, Ellis said.
Stakeholders had asked how the distributed and emerging technologies future differed from MISO’s continued fleet change, which originally predicted similar renewable penetrations, demand-side additions and coal generation retirements. (See MISO Introduces Distributed Energy Future for 2018 Tx Planning.) Ellis said the siting of resources is the main difference between the two futures. “It’s more distributed, more local to load.”
The distributed and emerging technologies future also includes the addition of 2 GW of storage by 2032 and the assumption that 25% of all new car sales by 2032 are electric vehicles — driving up MISO load by 60 TWh in 2032.
Though the MTEP 18 futures are still technically a proposal, and stakeholders have until June 1 to provide comments, Ellis said he does not expect details to change much before the final future definitions are revealed at the June PAC meeting. MISO will also discuss MTEP 18 futures weighting at the June meeting, with the RTO unveiling some weighting “process reforms,” he said.
At the January PAC meeting, some stakeholders, especially those hailing from MISO South, argued that the Trump administration’s distaste for carbon regulations should influence the RTO’s weighting process. As a result, MISO placed less emphasis on its accelerated alternative technologies future in the South region’s market congestion planning study. (See MISO Changes MTEP Futures Weighting for South.)
MISO: Non-Tx Alternatives in Tx Planning Process by Late Summer
MISO is moving to include non-transmission alternatives in Business Practices Manual 020, which governs transmission planning procedures.
Adviser Matt Tackett said staff will not adopt the BPM language until the PAC makes an official recommendation, expected at the June meeting. He added that stakeholders had not suggested any significant changes in the last round of feedback.
The revision dictates that “both transmission and non-transmission alternatives to resolve transmission issues will be considered on a comparable basis” in MTEP cycles. MISO said non-transmission alternatives can include “contracted demand response, new or upgraded generators with executed interconnection agreements and other non-transmission assets (e.g., energy storage not classified as a transmission asset, etc.).” (See “Rules on Non-Transmission Alternatives Ready for PAC Review,” MISO Planning Subcommittee Briefs.)
MISO’s process for considering non-transmission alternatives involves:
an evaluation of the transmission need; flagging constraints that cannot be adequately addressed by non-transmission alternatives;
conducting analyses to find the best bus location or amounts of injections or withdrawals of real or reactive power that would resolve the issue;
determining minimum project requirements; and
performing a final analysis to determine if a proposed non-transmission project solves the problem.
MISO expects the updated BPM to become effective Aug. 1.
MISO Fields Another Expedited Review Request
MISO has received a new expedited project review request to connect load from a northern Michigan steel mill to a member ahead of the MTEP timetable.
Wolverine Power Supply Cooperative plans to connect 24.4 MW of industrial load from a nearby steel mill, a blend of induction furnace and plant auxiliary system load, to its Advance-Van Tyle 138-kV transmission line at a cost of $6.15 million.
The cooperative estimates that transmission structures need to be ordered by the end of August to meet a promised March 1, 2018, in-service date, making the regularly scheduled December Board of Directors decision date for MTEP too late, Manager of Transmission Expansion Planning Thompson Adu said.
Adu said MISO has also received another expedited project review request from a Michigan market participant, as well as two requests from companies in MISO South, but they have not yet been posted publicly, as the RTO is still reviewing the requests.
RENSSELAER, N.Y. — NYISO reported Wednesday that natural gas prices rose 73% in April year-on-year but were still “historically low.” Natural gas (Transco Z6 NY) in April cost $2.81/MMBtu, down from $3.49/MMBtu in March.
In his Market Operations Report to the Business Issues Committee, Rana Mukerji, senior vice president for market structures, reported an average year-to-date cost in April of $37.05/MWh, up 21% from $30.71/MWh in April 2016. Locational-based marginal pricing (LBMP) for April came in at $31.06/MWh; down from $34.97/MWh in March 2017 and higher than $27.96/MWh in April 2016.
| NYISO
Generation averaged 377 GWh/day in April, down from 419 GWh/day in March 2017 and 385 GWh/day in April 2016.
April distillate prices came in higher compared to the previous month and up 29.5% year-on-year, with Jet Kerosene Gulf Coast at $11.15/MMBtu, up from $10.69/MMBtu in March, and Ultra Low Sulfur No. 2 Diesel NY Harbor at $11.31/MMBtu, up from $10.90/MMBtu. Uplift rose in April to 12 cents/MWh (excluding NYISO cost of operations), higher than the 46 cents/MWh in March. The local reliability share was 20 cents/MWh, lower than 21 cents/MWh in March, and the statewide share was -8 cents/MWh, higher than the -67 cents/MWh in March. Total uplift costs with Schedule 1 components, including NYISO cost of operations, were higher than in March.
MISO Refunds Paid out to TOs
Ramapo Phase Angle Regulator | ConEd
Mukerji also presented NYISO’s monthly Broader Regional Markets Report, highlighting that the grid operator in May completed paying refunds totaling $16.3 million and $1.27 million in interest to transmission owners for the Michigan-Ontario phase angle regulator. FERC last September rejected a MISO/ITC Holdings proposal to allocate 30.9% of the cost of ITC’s Michigan-Ontario PARs to New York, ruling in favor of NYISO and PJM. NYISO received the refund payment from MISO. (See MISO not Allowed to Allocate Lake Erie PARs Costs to PJM and NYISO.)
NYISO Complies with FERC Order 831
The ISO submitted an Order 831 compliance filing to FERC on May 8. The commission’s November 2016 order requires NYISO to 1) cap each resource’s incremental energy offer at the higher of $1,000/MWh or its verified cost-based incremental energy offer, and 2) to cap verified cost-based incremental energy offers at $2,000/MWh when calculating LBMPs.
Con Ed-PSEG Wheel Enters New Protocol
NYISO and PJM this month implemented a new protocol for the Con Ed-PSEG “wheel” to replace the agreement that expired after Consolidated Edison chose not to renew the contracts for the wheel. NYISO and PJM filed jointly with FERC on Jan. 31. FERC accepted the NYISO-PJM filing effective May 1, subject to refund and further FERC order. (See NYISO Members OK End to Con Ed-PSEG Wheel.)
Con Ed Gets Approval to Install 2nd PAR at Ramapo
The committee voted to recommend Management Committee approval of a tariff modification to fund Con Ed’s replacement and operation of the Ramapo PAR #3500, destroyed in a fire last June. Con Ed, though opposed to what it sees as cumbersome Tariff and rate schedule filings, pledged to complete installation of the second PAR by early fall 2017.
The cost allocation is statewide across all New York load-serving entities, but the proposed rules would reimburse the LSEs with any monies eventually paid by PJM and its TOs, or refunded by Con Ed. Contingent on approval by the Management Committee, the Board of Directors would vote on the proposal in June or July. (See NYISO, PJM Discuss PARs’ Benefits, Cost Allocation.)
NYISO to Eliminate Bond Fund Options
The BIC also voted to recommend Management Committee approval of a proposal to eliminate the bond fund options as an alternative to cash collateral. Sheri Prevratil, manager of corporate credit, said that historically there has been very low market participant use of the bond funds — on average, only $500,000, or 0.17%, of total cash collateral has been invested.
No other ISO/RTO offers bond funds for cash collateral investments. If the NYISO board approves it, the measure would be filed under Section 205 of the Federal Power Act, with revisions to Attachment K of the Market Administration and Control Area Services Tariff and Attachments U and V of the Open Access Transmission Tariff.
CHICAGO — The PJM Annual Meeting marked the swan song for longtime consumer advocate Dan Griffiths, executive director of the Consumer Advocates of the PJM States.
PJM officials and stakeholders feted Griffiths on Monday at the annual meeting between the PJM Board of Managers, environmental groups and state consumer advocates. Griffiths, who became CAPS’ first executive director in September 2013, is being replaced by Greg Poulos, former director of regulatory affairs for demand response provider EnerNOC. (See CAPS Hires EnerNOC Alum as Executive Director.)
PJM CEO Andy Ott called Griffiths “a tremendous friend for many years.”
“Thank you very much for all you’ve done to bring CAPS to a level that it’s at,” he said. “The fact that there’s 22 [consumer advocates] here discussing these issues is a tremendous message of engagement. The desired outcome of these discussions is to make sure we understand each other, to communicate with each other and we move forward in a cooperative way.”
Griffiths responded with praise for the PJM stakeholder process. “The collegiality — even for people that I almost always disagree with — is fantastic,” he said. “I have never seen this anywhere else.”
Metrics
Griffiths started his career in 1979 at the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, developing metrics for utilities’ consumer services performance. He began specializing in electricity after restructuring in 1997, with several stints in private industry before returning to state government in 2000 as an assistant under then-Consumer Advocate Sonny Popowsky, a vacancy created when predecessor Denise Foster joined PJM. He retired from state government at the end of the Ed Rendell administration in 2010 as a deputy secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Energy and Technology Deployment.
He later served as DR provider Comverge’s delegate to the PJM stakeholder process. He was in that role when the newly formed CAPS selected him as its first executive director, using proceeds from Constellation Energy’s settlement with FERC in a market manipulation case. (See Consumer Advocates Name Director.)
Griffiths said the idea for CAPS began with conversations among him, Popowsky, West Virginia Public Advocate Jackie Roberts and Maryland Senior Assistant People’s Counsel Bill Fields.
CAPS’ biggest accomplishment during his tenure was helping state consumer advocates become engaged in PJM’s stakeholder process, he said in an interview at the Annual Meeting on May 15. “The first purpose was to make them understanding enough so that they could make decisions, so that they could vote in the stakeholder process … and be able to make thoughtful filings as opposed to ‘just say no’ filings.”
The engagement has been illustrated in the recent Capacity Construct/Public Policy Senior Task Force (CCPPSTF), he said.
“We had a one-hour meeting today to discuss it. We’ve probably had eight hours of phone calls … over the past several months to talk about it,” he said. “The CAPS members — the state consumer advocates — really do have a drive to understand the policy now and be part of creating, rather than reacting to it.”
Permanent Funding
The Constellation money would have run out next year, so PJM’s decision to provide permanent funding — via a bill surcharge similar to that used to fund the state regulators’ Organization of PJM States Inc. — was crucial to its future.
FERC approved an initial annual budget of $450,000 in 2016. In addition to paying for the executive director, the funding also is used to cover advocates’ travel to PJM meetings. (See FERC Approves PJM Funding of Consumer Advocates.)
“We have ongoing funding and we’ve got [an] executive director who is outstanding: creative, ambitious, excellent in outreach and coalition building … and articulate,” Griffiths said. “And so I think that CAPS will be better after me. I think I’m leaving at the right time.”
Griffiths said the 13 states (and D.C.) in CAPS understand the impact of PJM on their customers’ electric bills.
“They wouldn’t be here if their [state] offices didn’t make a decision to dedicate resources to the PJM process. I think everybody understands now just how important that is. In a competitive state like Pennsylvania, you might have 70% of your electric bill that comes through the PJM process. You cannot mitigate that by doing things at the state level, no matter how much you want to. And even in … [vertically integrated] West Virginia, 50% of their process is coming through the PJM process.”
“Pennsylvania uses … about 138 million MWh. [Actually more than 146 million MWh in 2015, according to the PUC.] And if the pricing is [increased] by a buck, that’s a $138 million hit to the Pennsylvania economy. … There are Market Monitors out there who think a few bucks here or there is like, ‘Okay, that’s fine.’
“It’s not fine,” Griffiths continued. “Consumers are hurt even by small pricing errors, and so it’s important for [Independent Market Monitor] Joe Bowring to be able to continue to do his job and PJM to be vigilant about making sure that the prices are right. There’s people [on the supply side] who have a natural incentive — they have a fiduciary responsibility — to make prices go up.”
Asked what advice he had given Poulos, Griffiths responded: “There’s all these pieces [that] work together. You cannot just [focus on] the markets because it seems like that’s where [the money] is. If you have a [load] forecast that’s one level and it could be 2.5% less — as we found over the last couple of years as PJM changed its forecasting process —that’s 2.5% of a whole lot of money. You can’t neglect any of this stuff because the scale is so huge and it interacts. Energy market performance affects capacity, offer caps. And so it just keeps rolling along.”
Going Solo
Poulos, who previously worked as an assistant in the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, has been working for CAPS under Griffiths since the OPSI annual meeting in April. So is he ready to go it alone?
“Absolutely not,” he laughed during an interview Wednesday, describing the last several weeks of Griffiths’ tutelage as “drinking from a firehose.”
“But I’m in a really good position. He was so helpful with all the information. He has such a wealth of knowledge, even about the stakeholder process.”
“He was a true champion for consumers. That is very clear. He’s done a great job of advocating on behalf of the advocates and consumers. At the same time, he was a true friend and colleague to all [in the stakeholder process],” Poulos continued. He taught “the value of being a part of the community and making sure you participate and get to know everybody.”
On some issues, such as the cost and transparency of transmission expansion projects, CAPS is likely to have a unified position. But Poulos said there are times when his role will be less a lobbyist than a facilitator, providing information for individual state advocates.
In preparing for FERC’s May 1-2 technical conference on tensions between state actions and wholesale markets, “it was very clear that we at CAPS did not have a position and could not have a position,” he said. Some advocates “wanted to [accommodate] state actions and others want a true market where state actions aren’t considered.”
Off to Europe
Griffiths left the annual meeting early Tuesday to begin a month-long trip to Austria, Switzerland and Italy with his wife, Maureen Mulligan, a retired solar energy and energy-efficiency activist.
He hasn’t closed the door to returning to the industry in some fashion but has no plans. “I cannot come back here and work for anybody on the supply side … because their interests are so different than [consumers] and I think people … would think I was being hypocritical,” he said.
“I talked to folks a little bit about [doing] things outside PJM but I’m not dying to travel. I’ve done a lot of travel in my years. You know, after a while there’s no glory in travel. It’s just the torture you go through to do your job.”
Reforms to CAISO’s congestion revenue rights auctions will come only after painstaking analysis of what is causing the auctions to pay out significantly more money than they take in as revenue, the ISO official leading the effort told stakeholders Tuesday.
“We really want to lay down what’s going on and understand the dynamics of the auction,” Guillermo Bautista Alderete, CAISO director of market analysis and forecasting, said during a May 16 Market Performance and Planning Forum. “We want to understand what are the drivers [of revenue shortfalls] and have an informed set of data that can guide us into what the policy’s going to be.”
Any policy changes are likely to prove contentious among market participants with a stake in the auctions.
The CAISO Department of Market Monitoring insists that the ISO-sponsored auctions should be replaced with a bilateral market that doesn’t leave utility ratepayers as unwilling counterparties in losing deals.
On the other side stand the Western Power Trading Forum and DC Energy — a firm specializing in trading CRRs and other financial instruments tied to power and natural gas markets — which argue that the auctions provide the only liquid market for hedging congestion risk in the ISO’s wholesale market.
Most stakeholders, including the ISO’s load-serving entities, sit somewhere in the middle of the debate but tend to agree the auctions require significant changes, if not dissolution.
CAISO is seeking to understand why the ISO’s congestion revenue rights auctions have been a consistent money-loser for California ratepayers. | CAISO Department of Market Monitoring
Bautista Alderete said the CAISO plan for examining the CRR auctions was shaped by suggestions coming out of an April 18 working group convened to kick off the initiative. (See Heated Start for CAISO CRR Reform Initiative.)
The analysis phase will begin with ISO staff picking off the “low-hanging fruit” to be found in the auction results: “Profits, losses, who’s losing, who’s winning over time [and outcomes of] the annual [auction] versus the monthly,” Bautista Alderete said.
A second, “more complex” phase will look at how various auctions were modeled and compare that information to how the transmission system was modeled in the day-ahead markets on which CRR payments are settled. That will require an accounting of transmission outages, and whether they were included in auction models.
“These types of metrics are not that simple” to produce, Bautista Alderete said.
A third, “most complicated” phase will delve into the transmission system constraint by constraint, focusing on those constraints that did not bind (or show high congestion) in the auctions but paid out to CRR holders in the day-ahead market, as well as constraints responsible for the largest payouts.
“That is the type of analysis that we want to take on to understand the efficiency of the auction, because once we can understand what is behind the specific divergence between day-ahead and [the auctions] — the specific driver for revenue insufficiency — we can really start putting the pieces together for why we landed there, [for] why we have a systemic constraint that is always on the winning side or the losing side,” Bautista Alderete said.
In order for the findings to be “meaningful,” he added, the ISO must undertake a time-consuming process of examining constraint data going back to the start of the auctions, which will include determining how nomograms modeled in the CRR auctions may have changed in the corresponding day-ahead market.
Bautista Alderete expects the first round of “straightforward” data analysis related to auction results and settlements to be complete in two months. He provided no timeline for the other two phases.
“Once we complete the analysis phase, then we’re going to start moving into the discussion of the policy — what we need to do. Do we need to scrap the auction? Do we need to tweak the auction? That is the piece we need to reach only when we have determined, based on the analysis, what we need to do.”
It typically takes “two or three or four things” to occur for CAISO declare a grid emergency, according to Tim Beach, an operations shift manager with the ISO.
“Which is what played out here on May 3,” Beach said during a May 16 Market Performance and Planning Forum, at which he recounted why CAISO on that day declared its first Stage 1 emergency in 10 years.
The causes on this day: high temperatures, a generator failure, no-show imports and a rebuff from suppliers.
Although May 3 was forecast to be one of the warmest days of the year to date, it was considered a day with “pretty normal” conditions, Beach said. Los Angeles area temperatures ranged from the mid-80s downtown to the mid-90s farther inland and to the north.
System loads began to diverge from day-ahead forecasts about 1 p.m. “That’s not unusual,” Beach said. “We typically see a lot of that. We’ll see it diverge and we’ll also see it come back and converge again at peak or after peak.”
About 10 minutes later, a 330-MW unit at AES’ gas-fired Alamitos generating station in Long Beach shut down unexpectedly, taking with it 270 MW of energy production that had been awarded in the day-ahead market.
The unexpected shutdown of one unit at AES’s Alamitos generation station was one of a handful of events that precipitated CAISO’s May 3 “Stage 1” emergency. | California Energy Commission
Still, conditions remained normal throughout the afternoon, and the ISO was carrying ample reserves by the time load peaked at 5:45 p.m.
No Shows
But a short time later, about 1,150 MW of imports scheduled in the day-ahead market didn’t materialize. The hour-ahead market then awarded 1,230 MW of supplemental energy on the interties for the hour ending 8 p.m. But about 830 MW of the awards were declined by the suppliers.
“So going into hour ending [8 p.m.], we’re over the peak. We’ve got solar ramping off very quickly. It’s starting to look pretty tight,” Beach said.
At 6:42 p.m., with solar quickly coming off the system, the shift manager on duty began canvassing the utilities for available DR.
“That’s a typical procedure we do,” Beach said. “We go out and look and make sure we have a number that we can operate to.”
Within 15 minutes, the shift manager determined that the ISO’s area control error — the difference between actual and scheduled generation — was at 750 MW. With solar continuing to roll off the system, the manager was forced to deploy reserves, which then fell to about two-thirds of the 1,870-MW requirement.
Emergency Declared; DR Called
About 7 p.m., CAISO declared the Stage 1 emergency, simultaneously calling for 843 MW of DR from the utilities.
“And at [7:34 p.m.], with the DR deployed, our ACE was up to 34 MW on the plus side,” Beach said. “So we recovered briefly, but solar is still ramping off — but the load’s ramping off at the same time.”
By 8 p.m. the situation had stabilized. The ISO called off the emergency an hour later.
Brian Theaker, director of market affairs at NRG Energy, asked how much of the 843 MW of DR deployed by the ISO actually responded to the dispatch call.
“I can’t establish that at this time,” Beach said. “I think the market analysis [will provide] the exact number or a close number. We’ll rely on some of that to come from the utilities as well.”
Wei Zhou, senior project manager at Southern California Edison, asked whether transfers from the Western Energy Imbalance Market (EIM) assisted during the event.
“There were about 500 MW of transfers around that time, so it was helping us,” said Guillermo Bautista Alderete, CAISO director of market analysis and forecasting.
Why the Rejections?
Bautista Alderete was unable to address a question about exactly why suppliers on the interties declined the 8,300 MW of awards ahead of the event. Such declines are not unusual, but “not to this level, not to this volume,” he responded.
“This is somehow an action that [suppliers] can take and this is something we have to discuss further as to how we can enhance the procedure that we have,” Bautista Alderete said. “Because usually you don’t want to see them decline when you need that [energy] most.”
“Was it a lot of different entities that made up the 830 [MW of declines] or was it just a few?” asked Carolyn Kehrein, a consultant for Energy Users Forum.
“I would love to give you an answer on that,” Bautista Alderete said. “We haven’t completed the full analysis, so I would like to hold off on that answer.”
Additional research has reinforced earlier projections that MISO’s market platform will become obsolete in five to seven years, RTO executives told members of the Board of Directors on Tuesday.
Ever-evolving cybersecurity standards are contributing to the system’s end and MISO’s vendors plan to stop supporting its platform by 2023 as they shift to newer technology, officials said. The RTO has predicted that with “limited investments,” its market platform can only accommodate a “modest increase in complexity” and has five to seven years before it can no longer clear the day-ahead market.
“The market systems’ likely end of life is in sight, and our studies have only confirmed that we’ll need a substantial upgrade,” MISO Executive Director of Market Design Jeff Bladen told directors on a May 16 conference call of the board’s Technology Committee.
MISO began a stress test study last fall examining how the performance and security of its critical operating system would hold up over time. (See MISO to Study Aging Software; Market Improvements Planned for 2017.) Since then, MISO has completed nine one-on-one workshops with vendors to discuss the overhaul.
Recommendations Due in June
Bladen’s staff is drafting near- and long-term upgrade recommendations and will issue them, and post-2018 budget estimates, during the board’s June week of meetings in Branson, Mo.
A business case recommending a specific course of action for a long-term platform upgrade will come in two to three years after multiple viability tests, Bladen said. MISO wants the replacement platform to employ a modular architecture, allowing replacement of individual components without affecting the rest of the system.
MISO Director Baljit Dail asked if the end of vendor support at the end of 2023 is a hard and fast date. MISO Technology Executive Kevin Caringer said vendors have agreed that the end year might be extended if absolutely necessary. “It’s not a date that we can negotiate out forever, but there is some flexibility,” Caringer said.
Directors asked for a special meeting in front of MISO membership and the full board to discuss the technology study and a range of possible improvements. Staff said the meeting could be scheduled sometime in October. A more detailed rundown of MISO technology improvements and goals was reserved for the committee’s closed session following the meeting.
Heavy Demands from CIP Standards
MISO said NERC’s Critical Infrastructure Protection standards are outstripping the adaptions it can make. Compliance with the standards will require investment in near-term improvements in 2017 and 2018, MISO Chief Information Officer Keri Glitch said.
MISO expects more new NERC standards in 2019, among them tighter requirements for control center communications and supply chain risk management, requiring verification of vendors, neighboring ISOs and market participants.
MISO’s Carmel. Indiana Control Room in 2013 | MISO
“We know the speed of change is not going to slow down,” said Glitch, pointing to the seven versions of CIP standards rolled out since 2008.
Painting the Golden Gate Bridge
“At what point does this become painting the Golden Gate Bridge, where there’s just so much stuff we can’t keep up?” Dail asked.
Glitch said MISO is already preparing for its 2018 audit, which isn’t slated to begin until the fall. “We’re in a continual cycle because of the audit process.”
More than 975 cyber assets and 59,500 pages of evidence will be scrutinized in the NERC audit next year, Glitch said — almost three times the volume examined in the 2012 audit. “The electric industry has undergone tremendous change to critical infrastructure standards,” she said.
Director Michael Curran also asked if staff from NERC itself can keep up with the corporation’s accelerated rate of new compliance standards and changes to existing standards.
“That’s a loaded question,” Glitch said. “I do see that they’ve made improvements over the last few years. From a MISO perspective, are they making all the improvements MISO would like to see? Perhaps not, but they are more open to suggestions.”
“The answer I heard is ‘No, they haven’t kept up, but they’re listening,’” Curran replied.
Ransomware Attack
During the meeting, MISO directors stressed the importance of cybersecurity in light of the massive, ongoing WannaCry ransomware attacks, which have been linked to North Korean IP addresses.
“NERC compliance does not equal security. Just because you’re NERC-compliant does not mean you’re not going to have an attack,” Glitch said.
GROTON, Conn. — The best strategy to deal with change in the energy sector is to embrace it. So said some of the more than 250 participants at the Northeast Energy and Commerce Association and Connecticut Power and Energy Society’s 24th New England Energy Conference last week.
NECA President Tina Bennett, a principal consultant with Daymark Energy Advisors, said that the electric markets should “accept disruption” from new technologies by creating a new regulatory landscape.
“The model today is not really conducive for where we want to go in the future,” Bennett said, citing the growing impact of distributed energy resources. “What are the things we can do today from a regulatory perspective and from a business model perspective that can open up possibilities for the disruption to happen?”
Former Massachusetts Undersecretary of Energy Barbara Kates-Garnick, now a professor of practice at Tufts University, agreed.
“We are going to have to accept disruption, but that is something that we as the energy industry haven’t been easily able to accept,” she said. “The future is not linear, it’s not a straight line, and we’re going to have to design processes that have off ramps and that also enable rewards for those people and those entities that take risk.”
Angela M. O’Connor, chairman of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, said her state is “at a crossroads. We’re number one in the nation in energy efficiency, but our programs are also the most expensive in the country. When lighting requirements change, what will the next programs and the benefits look like?”
RTOs are trying to automate their grids, but high penetration of distributed energy resources means they have to operate their feeders with less flexibility at times depending on renewable penetration levels, or “hosting capacity,” said Scott Higgins, director of distributed energy and microgrids for Schneider Electric.
The job of managing the grid is complicated by different market participants — independent power producers, utilities and behind-the-meter “energy prosumers” — each having different goals, contracts and control systems.
To illustrate the challenge, Higgins mentioned the use of battery storage to shave a “prosumer’s” peak in the middle of the day. “But we also have a demand response event coming up later in the afternoon and the control system will need to recharge the battery for that. The DR event benefits the prosumer, but it is initiated by the utility, so at some point the control algorithm decides to stop peak shaving and to charge the battery. What if the prosumer has an economic interest in peak shaving longer and foregoing the demand response event that day? Contracts and control systems both have to draw the line at some point between serving one customer constituent and another.”
With the huge investments needed in upgrading transmission and developing renewables, “we can make use of that grid; we don’t need to be trying to escape the grid,” said Jeffrey Roark of the Electric Power Research Institute.
Alan Trotta, director of wholesale power contracts for United Illuminating, offered some statistics illustrating the growth of DER. “In 2011 we had fewer than 100 requests for interconnection with distributed generation units,” he said. In 2016 “there were over 3,000 requests and over 2,300 new behind-the-meter generators interconnected.”
For maximum cost-effectiveness of decarbonization of the grid, go big, said Trotta, referring to the difference in customer costs between grid-scale renewables and DERs. “The economies of scale are real and we see it in actual procurement results.” Speaking about the evolving role of the grid, Trotta said, “The grid is changing because the needs of the users are changing, and by users, I mean customers, generators, potential storage developers [and] people in the transportation sector.”
Electric Vehicles
Many in the industry are confident that electric vehicles will cause an increase in loads after years of flat or declining power demand. Martin Stahl, managing director of Germany-based Stahl Automotive Consultants, forecast that EV sales in the U.S. will increase seven-fold to nearly 1.4 million by 2025. The main constraint on EVs, he said, is a lack of charging infrastructure.
Stahl Automotive Consulting
Stahl said utilities are committed to building an EV charging infrastructure in Germany, where the decision to give up nuclear power increased renewable commitments and added stress to the grid.
Well-placed chargers are essential to avoiding excessive spending on public and private charging infrastructure, Stahl said. “But more important is the demand response function, either regulated or behind-the-meter,” he said. Fast-charging equipment is expensive and needs to be connected to higher voltage lines, while at-home charging is almost invisible to utilities. “We are exploring with clients how to ensure that emerging load can be put to a good time of the day,” he said.
Stahl Automotive Consulting
For example, he estimated that with good location planning and optimization, EV charging could decrease the average residential ratepayer bill by nearly 10%, versus a 1.5% increase with no optimization.
Timing is crucial to those who seek to introduce change, Stahl said. “The ones who do that too early are also on the wrong side of the game. We saw that especially with electric vehicles, where the early players did not make it.”
ENGIE North America CEO Frank Demaille said his company and Axium Infrastructure US recently signed a $1.2 billion 50-year contract with Ohio State University to map and implement the school’s energy sustainability strategy. One initial goal is to reduce energy consumption at the 485-building campus by 25% within 10 years. A contract with such a long lifespan means “you can really build something with a strong partner,” Demaille said.
Decoupling revenues from sales is a good start to make utilities “indifferent to increasing energy efficiency on their system,” Trotta said. Referring to the expansion of net metering, however, Trotta said, “We may need to see new rate structures in the future that send the appropriate economic signals to all of the users of the grid.”
There’s no doubt that the market structure and the rate design need to change, O’Connor said. “We want utilities to do much more now under the same rate structure from 20 years ago.”
On whether RTOs’ focus on reliability conflicts with the environmental goals of states, Macky McCleary of the Rhode Island Division of Public Utilities and Carriers said he preferred to acknowledge tension, rather than conflict. “It’s a shared concern, and the ISO can help make it cheaper to achieve those environmental goals,” he said.
“The only resources left to rely on the existing wholesale markets in New England are natural gas generators and old nukes,” said Susan Tierney, senior adviser with The Analysis Group. “Policymakers in the states are making a big bet that those markets will remain sustainable.”
ALBANY, N.Y. — At FERC’s technical conference May 1 and 2, several commenters observed that it is easier to coordinate state policy with wholesale markets when the market is a single state, as in NYISO.
But there was no groupthink on display at the Independent Power Producers of New York’s 31st Annual Spring Conference last week, where industry stakeholders and state and ISO officials debated carbon policy, zero-emission credits for nuclear plants, the closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant and the Champlain-Hudson transmission line.
In particular, the conference highlighted the differences between the administration of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Republican-controlled State Senate, the ISO and IPPNY itself.
Arguably, no state officials are pushing more ambitious changes for the electric industry than New York’s — with the Reforming the Energy Vision initiative — for transitioning to a less centralized, more renewable-based future.
Richard Kauffman, chairman of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and Cuomo’s top energy official, began his speech to IPPNY by acknowledging the tensions.
“That was quite a pointed introduction,” he joked when IPPNY CEO Gavin Donohue welcomed him to the podium after laying out the organization’s complaints over the state’s “out-of-market” policies.
Kauffman also acknowledged that “It’s no secret that we haven’t been in very good alignment with the NYISO.”
“I’m sure that Brad Jones keeps a copy of my love letter to him on his dartboard,” he said, referring to the missive he sent last July in response to comments the ISO filed with the Public Service Commission on the state’s Clean Energy Standard.
The letter dismissed NYISO’s filing as “misleading, incomplete and grossly inaccurate” and lectured the ISO on the need to combat climate change. Kauffman also accused the ISO of being “held captive” by stakeholders representing “status quo interest that are threatened by the renewable future” — singling out IPPNY by name.
At the conference, Kauffman declined to offer an opinion on the ISO’s carbon adder plan, saying officials of NYSERDA and the Department of Public Service had just begun to review it. (See related story, NYISO Carbon Adder to Test FERC’s Independence, IPPNY Panelists Say.)
But he made it clear any ISO plan would have to “harmonize” with REV and insisted the state’s actions were justified responses to market imperfections.
“We recognize the valuable role the federal wholesale markets can play,” he said. “But the truth is in our view those wholesale markets are not living up to their potential because of a failure to effectively harmonize with the states’ public policy. … Given the uncertainty in Washington, the state will not cede what it considers its role in energy and environmental policy.”
REV’s Objective
He said REV’s objective is to provide market-based incentives for private capital to build “the 21st century grid” with “a mix of central station production and distribution with distributed nodes; where supply and demand are dynamic and electrons can flow in more than one direction.”
The new grid must be “both more energy and capital efficient,” he said. “Fifty-four percent average capacity utilization — which is what our entire system is in New York state, a number which is declining — is a low number in terms of capital efficiency.
“We can’t achieve the governor’s mandate of 50% renewables by 2030 by doing things the same way. … We’ve been bolting things onto a system that it wasn’t designed for. Those things include renewables and [distributed energy resources]. … And the same way we’ve been physically bolting renewables and DER onto the grid never intended for these resources, we’ve recognized that we can’t keep bolting on policies onto a policy regime that was not intended for that purpose either.”
Kauffman said he would not answer questions about ZECs because of the suit filed by IPPNY members Dynegy, Eastern Generation and NRG Energy claiming the ZECs intrude on FERC’s jurisdiction. He said only that “the governor did not want to lose ground in carbon emissions by the upstate plants closing.” (See Federal Suit Challenges NY Nuclear Subsidies.)
Donohue concluded Kauffman’s session by imploring him, Jones and Scott Weiner, the DPS’ deputy for markets and innovation, to “keep working to come up with this market fix so that Chairwoman [Cheryl] LaFleur … can help us implement something to save our markets in New York.”
The Cuomo administration’s differences with the State Legislature were also on display as State Sen. Joseph Griffo (R), chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Telecommunications, told the conference that the Senate will “carefully vet” Cuomo’s nominees to the PSC. “It’s not going to be a pro forma type of submission,” he said. (See related story, Cuomo Names NYSERDA CEO as PSC Chair.)
New York State Assemblywoman Amy Paulin (D), chair of the Committee on Energy, outlined her objections to the statewide cost allocation of the ZEC subsidies, saying the costs for the upstate generators should not be imposed on her Westchester County constituents. Assembly members were left fuming in March when the PSC and NYSERDA declined to send witnesses to a hearing on the program and Exelon sent no senior executive with knowledge of the subsidy negotiations. (See NY Legislators Frustrated by Lack of Answers at ZEC Hearing.)
Indian Point
Some legislators are also upset with Cuomo’s deal to shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant by 2021. The governor has long opposed the plant because of its proximity to New York City.
In March, ISO and PSC officials told a joint hearing chaired by Paulin and Griffo that they are not concerned about replacing the capacity of the 2,069-MW plant, saying energy efficiency, transmission upgrades and the ISO’s wholesale market will ensure reliability.
IPPNY Chair John Reese, senior vice president of Eastern Generation, indicated in remarks to the conference that he is not satisfied with those assurances. “What does the future look like? We have no idea,” he said.
Reese said the ISO should begin an impact study on the retirement immediately rather than waiting for a formal retirement notice, which might not come until 2020 or later. “It takes a minimum of four to six years to build infrastructure in N.Y. If Indian Point presents an issue on [power] supply, we need to know now.”
Champlain-Hudson Transmission Line
“What should definitely be off the table [among potential Indian Point replacements] is the remarkably uneconomic Champlain-Hudson [Power] Express transmission line,” Donohue said.
Earlier this year, Paulin and Griffo introduced what Paulin called an IPPNY “priority bill” that would prohibit the New York Power Authority from purchasing energy from the proposed line (A07685, S05126.)
IPPNY claims the project — which would transmit 1,000 MW of Canadian hydropower to the New York metro area — could not be built without direct or indirect subsidies, such as “extra-market contracts” with a state entity. The project was proposed by Transmission Developers Inc., which claims the $2.2 billion project would be one of the largest investments in New York state history.
“The state’s view has not changed,” Kauffman said. “TDI is a merchant line. This means a customer or customers need to sign up for the power. … The cost of the transmission line will not be passed along to any ratepayers.”
Since she was appointed to FERC in 2010, acting Chair Cheryl LaFleur has served with seven commissioners and two chairmen, Jon Wellinghoff and Norman Bay.
Now, after operating without a quorum since February, she is about to be joined by as many as four new commissioners appointed by President Trump. It will be the biggest turnover at the commission since at least 1993 — a transition she has come to call “FERC 2.0.” (See No 2nd Term for FERC’s Colette Honorable.)
The chairman sat down for an interview last week with RTO Insider editor Rich Heidorn Jr., a former FERC staffer, about whether the commission can maintain its reputation for nonpartisanship, her reflections on the commission’s May 1-2 technical conference on tensions between state policies and wholesale markets, and the grid security study ordered by Energy Secretary Rick Perry. The transcript below has been edited for clarity and length.
RTO Insider: So first off, a week after the technical conference, are you more or less optimistic about the future of the wholesale markets than you were before?
Cheryl LaFleur: I would say that the conference met our expectations, which I think were difficult to fulfill. We wanted to have all the different views represented and aired in a very transparent way to try to frame the issues and I think that happened. We wanted to get a better sense of what the consequences were of the different potential solutions, and I think to a large measure, that happened. And we wanted to create a sense of momentum behind the issue without having the ability to vote out anything to create a sense of momentum, and I think we did create a sense of momentum that we are now trying to sustain.
RTO Insider: In your opening remarks May 1, you talked about feeling like you had been punched in the gut when you read Sue Tierney’s words from the 2013 capacity market technical conference. In retrospect, do you feel like the 2013 conference was a missed opportunity? Or do you not have time for regrets about that? (See Capacity Market Attracts Praise, Criticism at FERC.)
Cheryl LaFleur: Well, I don’t think this particular issue of state policies and the markets was really fully framed in 2013. Although I do clearly … Dr. Tierney did allude to it, and I remember at that 2013 conference, her distinctly talking about the Clean Power Plan and so forth, which nobody else was talking about then. I think actually, in my opinion, quite a lot came out of the 2013 tech conference. As part in response to conversations at that tech conference, we saw a settlement achieved in New England, which led to the sloped demand curve and the renewables exemption, which was very clearly discussed at the conference. And in some ways the Capacity Performance, Pay-for-Performance proposals that we saw come out of [PJM and] New England in some ways were generated by things at that conference so I thought that was one of our more productive conferences.
I said at the time of the 2013 conference and it’s still true, that there’s two competing things we hear all the time. The first is: Stop making changes in the capacity markets. And the second is: Make my change please. And I think the concept that when we’ve had a successful tech conference, it’ll be when nothing changes anymore because the world is going to be, as it is may be, illusory. Because I think the issues that are framed now in the 2017 tech conference have evolved.
RTO Insider: So, there was a reference earlier today to the Rick Perry comments and this need to study grid reliability. Isn’t that kind of a slap in the face to what you guys at FERC have been doing for the last couple of years?
Cheryl LaFleur: Well, FERC and DOE we have always worked in parallel or in a complementary way. I mean, they made [us] aware they were putting out the memo. Presumably they’re going to do this study. I don’t remember when the 60 days run out, but it’s relatively soon and it’ll be a piece that’s part of the conversation.
RTO Insider: So, would it surprise you if they came up with anything you haven’t already talked about?
Cheryl LaFleur: I can’t surmise that. I mean, there’s always new things under the sun.
RTO Insider: So let’s talk about the quorum news. How well do you know Powelson and Chatterjee?
Cheryl LaFleur: I know both of them. In general, I’m saying I’m very happy that we got the news. I appreciate the White House making the announcement. I appreciate Sen. [Lisa] Murkowski [R-Alaska, chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee] saying she was going to act on them quickly. I tried to sort of in general not comment on individuals. But I do know these gentlemen. I’m very happy to see this news this week.
RTO Insider: And do you have any sense of when the player to be named later [third Republican nominee] may be named?
Cheryl LaFleur: I read in the press soon, but hopefully soon.
RTO Insider: What came out of the conference that perhaps most surprised you?
Cheryl LaFleur: Nothing was really surprising, but I think it was very important and informative to hear the different views of the different states, and we only saw [a] microcosm. I believe we had three of the PJM states there, and it was interesting to see where they were coming from I thought. Hearing the New England states — their representatives were very honest about some of the things they would and would not accept. I think that in itself, if that’s all we got out of the day, that would’ve had value. Because I mean they chose to come into a forum that was a FERC forum and express those views and that was very important.
RTO Insider: How does that play out when, let’s say, you get that filing from ISO New England for this two-tier capacity auction? Does having heard from the states give you some sense of, well here’s what the political realities are and we have to kind of take that into account?
Cheryl LaFleur: Well I would first of all hope that in the process that’s going to ensue between now and whenever any filing is made that there would be a discourse with the states as they go along. I feel like I’m on a little bit of a tour now because I’m in New York, doing PJM in a few weeks and then I’m going to [the New England Conference of Public Utilities Commissioners’ Annual Symposium]. And I know between the NECPUC meeting and then the [New England Power Pool] summer meeting, ISO New England will be talking a lot to the states. Certainly here in New York, one state, one ISO, so I would hope a lot of that would happen as they go along and it wouldn’t be a case of picking up a filing and finding out a state was unhappy that I didn’t know before.
RTO Insider: In other words, them filing an intervention.
Cheryl LaFleur: Or I mean I would hope that we would’ve known where the states were on the issues as we went along. Because really, as I said at the conference, the regional markets exist because of changes in state policy that gave rise to them. And they exist with the support of the states so they’re very important constituencies.
RTO Insider: If in fact the capacity market becomes less central to, let’s say operations in PJM, because public power persuades the commission that they should have more latitude, is that necessarily a failure of the markets? Or would you say that the capacity markets have always been kind of a Rube Goldbergian device, and so it’s to be expected some people may want to opt out of it?
Cheryl LaFleur: There are different ways you can do resource adequacy, and a spectrum of different ways you can do resource adequacy, and I try to have an open mind about the ways that the regions do it. If you look at the way the Southwest Power Pool does resource advocacy versus California versus New England, there’s different models.
I feel the only failure would be if we didn’t plan for resource adequacy and stumbled into something. Or if something fell between the cracks in the federal government and the state government. But different systems that different states come up with, I have an open mind.
RTO Insider: How, if at all, do you expect the new commissioners to change the dynamics on the commission? As long as I’ve been following the commission — back to when I worked there under Pat Wood — what I’ve always been impressed by in the FERC building, as opposed to much of the rest of Washington, is the lack of partisanship. We rarely mention commissioners’ party affiliations because you don’t really see that playing out in how they vote. Any reason to think that might change under the new regime?
Cheryl LaFleur: Well I think FERC does have the strong tradition of bipartisanship and making decisions based on the facts and the law, and I certainly hope that we’ll continue and that the new commissioners, as they’re sworn in, will continue in that tradition. I think in terms of the dynamics — not partisanship, just the dynamics in general — we’ll see a change in the commission the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1993, maybe even more. Because generally, you have one commissioner at a time come on, you have the four who were there and one individual comes on. And every time a new person comes, it changes the shape of the whole. But to have up to four come on at a time — including a chairman — that’s a big turnover. In 1993, four came at once, but the chairman was there already. So, that’s a big turnover. But I believe the tradition of — or more than a tradition — the expectation of making decisions by the record and bipartisanship will continue.
RTO Insider: Somebody had floated the notion that the president is not actually required to appoint two Democrats to the other seats. He can appoint three Republicans, but he can appoint independents or what have you. Have you heard anything about that — that there is going to be any change in the way they handle that?
Cheryl LaFleur: No I believe the law says only three of the president’s party. I have heard no changes.
RTO Insider: So you don’t anticipate that’s likely to happen.
Cheryl LaFleur: The White House has not shared with me their plans. I’ve said all along my hope is that they appoint people who are experienced in energy, and so far, they have.
RTO Insider: And along the lines of that, have you been given any indication whether they might continue you in an interim position as chair for a while after the new commissioners are sworn in?
Cheryl LaFleur: No.
RTO Insider: Okay. We’ll all have to wait to find out.
Cheryl LaFleur: I mean there’s so many different ways this can go. I think a lot also is riding on when the third nomination comes, and how these nominations proceed. But, regardless of how long I’m chairman, my focus right now is on getting the backlog and the issues that are pending before us framed in the best way we can to help the onboarding commissioners come up to speed, and helping the work of the commission to move forward. I intend to stay afterward as a commissioner so I’ll be there for the transition. But even if I weren’t, the FERC staff will be there, and many of them have been there through several chairmen.
RTO Insider: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you want to put out there as your message coming out of either the tech conference, or just kind of the state of play right now?
Cheryl LaFleur: Well I guess I would just say on the tech conference, we have not yet issued, I don’t believe, our request for comments, but we hope to hear from voices beyond the ones who spoke at the tech conference. We know there were people who volunteered to speak, and others who might not have volunteered, but have something to say, and we hope to hear from them.
The only other thing you haven’t asked about is Commissioner [Colette] Honorable, which is also, it was only a couple weeks ago that happened. I was very sorry to hear her plans, although it’s obviously up to her. But she’s been a wonderful colleague and a great addition to the commission.
RTO Insider: Well we kind of assumed that prior to Commissioner Bay leaving, that her position would go to a Republican to make the balance. Once he left, in theory she could have stuck around. Do you know if she had an indication from the White House that she would not be reappointed?
Cheryl LaFleur: I don’t know any of that, and it’s not my place to say. While we’re talking about the new guys, she was great. She is great; she’s still there.
RTO Insider: And let me ask you one last question about the criticism of the public interest groups who claim they were not allowed to testify at the conference, and also about a lack of transparency in the RTOs. [See Public Interest Groups Cry Foul over Technical Conference, RTO Transparency.] I just wondered if you had any response on that, any comment on that.
Cheryl LaFleur: Well we tried to balance the panels and have a consumer viewpoint on every one of the panels, and I think we did, but as I said, we’re going to be putting out a request for comments and we certainly hope to hear from others as well.
RTO Insider: Are you happy with the level of transparency in the RTOs?
Cheryl LaFleur: I really don’t have any comment on that. We have an obligation to oversee their stakeholder processes and the way they decide things, and I asked a question about that at the tech conference in fact.
RTO Insider: I must have missed that.
Cheryl LaFleur: I don’t want to prejudge the … I don’t really have any comment. No, I think I picked up on one of the [witnesses] that said something about the stakeholder processes.
RTO Insider: Well thank you very much for your time, appreciate it.
