The California Independent System Operator's (CAISO) board of governors has recently approved new rules on how grid resources are monitored and managed.
By voting unanimously in support of the Reliability Services Proposal – Phase 1 initiative, the board acknowledged the new green grid paradigm is changing how the wholesale electric system is operated. As such, the manner in which resources are assessed and accessed under the state's resource adequacy rules must also change.
The CAISO established resource adequacy in 2004 to ensure all load-serving entities are procuring enough resources to reliably serve consumer demand – minute by minute, day after day.
‘We established this multiyear initiative to evolve the ISO's resource adequacy rules to make sure resources are offering energy to the wholesale market as expected and have the right technological capabilities to meet local, flexible and system needs,’ says Keith Casey, ISO vice president of market and infrastructure development for ISO.
‘This initiative requires a significant implementation effort, which includes coordinating with state regulators and our market participants, and will take about two years.’
The initiative's Phase 1 recommendations, which were approved include policies and processes to further integrate so-called preferred resources – such as renewables, energy efficiency, energy storage and demand response.Â
Also, new rules were greenlighted to encourage greater availability from resource adequacy designated resources that include demand response. The other revision adopted today will streamline resource outage rules.
According to the CAISO, Phase 2 of the initiative will begin this year and will seek to further enhance flexible resource adequacy requirements and planned outage rules.
To improve market efficiency and reliability, the board also approved a set of targeted market rule changes under the Commitment Cost Enhancements – Phase 2 initiative to better manage "use limited" resources. Use limited resources, such as hydroelectric plants and demand response, have technological reasons for being unable to operate continuously.Â
The initiative also enhances the current rules that account for the costs of operating multi-stage generators, which differ from typical generators in that the turbine units have different operational configurations with different minimum and maximum output levels.Â
The ISO tariff changes associated with the two initiatives will be filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates grid operators such as CAISO, for its approval.
To read more about Phase I and Phase 2, click here.
