Joseph Bowring, President of Monitoring Analytics, LLC, the Independent Market Monitor (IMM) for the PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization for the Mid-Atlantic states, has sent the RTO running back to Valley Forge with its tail between its legs, after having forced PJM to concede defeat in a dispute over the release and Internet posting of confidential bid and offer pricing data in the form of Excel spreadsheets relating to a recent Base Residual Auction (BRA) for the PJM capacity market, known as the Reliability Pricing Model (RPM), as was conducted in May 2009, for the 2012-2013 delivery year.

The issue was whether PJM had done enough to “aggregate” and “mask” the released data, so that clever market participants could not thumb through the spreadsheets with a discerning eye and figure out the exact price points contained in buy and sell bids submitted by rival utilities or generation capacity suppliers. Read more »

Posted: April 9th, 2010 under Bids and Offers, Capacity Markets, Confidential Information, Electric Utility Regulation, ISOs, Independent Market Monitor, Market Monitoring, PJM, RPM, RTOs, Reliability Pricing Model.
Comments: none

The notion of “reliability to the nines” — that electric utility service should be so reliable as to suffer an outage event on only one day in ten years — stands as a touchstone of  today’s electric utility industry. Yet it’s no more than myth, a sort of urban legend that likely sprouted wings back in the 1960s, after the first big New York City blackout, when the industry told Congress it could regulate itself by setting up voluntary reliability standards.  In truth, there is not now nor never has been a formal, nationwide electric reliability standard to require utilities to maintain a loss of load expectation (LOLE) no greater than 0.1 per year. It’s a canard, a chimera.  

That fact was made abundantly clear at the close of last year when, at long last, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) finally got around to filing a formal application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for approval of the proposed Regional Reliability Standard BAL-502-RFC-02 — Planning Resource Adequacy Analysis, Assessment and Documentation, to give the ”one day in ten years” standard the force of law – but only in the particular region known as Reliability First, which covers a wide swath of the mid-Atlantic and near Midwest, blanketing PJM and covering a substantial chunk of the Midwest ISO.

Read more »

Posted: March 30th, 2010 under Capacity Markets, Capacity Price, Cost of New Entry, Electric Utility Regulation, Energy Markets, Loss of Load Expectation, Loss of Load Probability, NERC, RTOs, Reliability, Reliability Standards, Reserve Margin, Resource Adequacy.
Comments: none