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ERCOT’s Technical Advisory Committee last week held its first full working meeting — albeit virtually — since the COVID-19 outbreak, endorsing a raft of revision requests, reviewing the committee’s strategic goals, and receiving updates from the Real-Time Co-Optimization Task Force (RTCTF). The committee last conducted a full meeting in January.

New England’s total wholesale costs of electricity last year fell 19% to $9.8 billion, driven mostly by lower energy costs, according to the ISO-NE Internal Market Monitor’s 2019 Annual Markets Report. Energy and capacity costs collectively composed about 93% of the overall decrease, as shown by highlights from the report...

It’s been almost two months since ISO-NE presented FERC with its Energy Security Improvements proposal, a generator-backed plan nearly two years in the making that split stakeholders so much that the RTO agreed to also submit an alternative supported by load interests. The time since the filing has done nothing...

Austin Energy has officially notified ERCOT that it plans to permanently retire one of the two original gas-fired steam units at its Decker Lake generating facility, effective Oct. 31. The municipal utility filed a notification of suspension of operations on Monday. The 315-MW Decker 1 unit began commercial operation in...

Given the continued uncertainty of future in-person meetings, ERCOT stakeholders last week endorsed several bylaw amendments and rule changes to improve electronic meetings and votes. As if to hammer the point home, the changes were among 15 voting items in an email vote that did not become official for two...

Preliminary results from an ISO-NE study show that the quantity of reserves needed in an increasingly renewable future will be a function of how well semi-dispatchable resources can be curtailed, the Planning Advisory Committee heard on Wednesday. Patrick Boughan, ISO-NE senior engineer for resource studies and assessments, presented that finding...

FERC on Thursday approved PJM’s proposed energy price formation revisions, agreeing with the RTO that its reserve market was not functioning as intended (EL19-58, ER19-1468). "PJM made a persuasive case that its current reserve market design must be overhauled," Chairman Neil Chatterjee said during the commission’s monthly open meeting, held...

FERC on Monday granted Goldman Sachs Renewable Power Marketing (GSRPM) authority to make market-based sales but said it would consider it an affiliate of The Goldman Sachs Group investment bank despite its objections (ER20-547-001). "Complete victory," responded Tyson Slocum, energy program director for Public Citizen, who filed a protest calling...

PJM’s Market Implementation Committee on Wednesday resumed its discussion on potential changes to how the RTO curtails generating output when needed to maintain stability during maintenance outages. Generating units must sometimes be reduced below their normal economic max limit if a planned or unplanned transmission outage presents stability problems that...

By Tom Kleckner ERCOT stakeholders have begun the arduous process of reviewing and commenting on the protocol changes the grid operator has drafted to add real-time co-optimization (RTC) to its energy-only market. Members of the Real-Time Co-optimization Task Force and other interested stakeholders began walking through staff’s initial set of...