On January 16, 2015, FERC issued a notice inviting parties to submit post-technical workshop comments regarding price formation in both the energy and ancillary services markets that are operated by Regional Transmission Organizations ("RTOs") and Independent System Operators ("ISOs"). Previously, FERC Staff conducted a series of technical workshops on September 8, October 28, and December 9, 2014, exploring these same price formation issues (see Sept. 15, 2014 edition of the WER). FERC's January notice invites parties to respond to specific questions that will further explore the topics that had been covered in the 2014 workshop series.
Topics that FERC invites parties to comment on include:
- Potential changes to the current generic cap on energy offers in order to allow for natural gas-fired generators to recover their costs when natural gas prices spike during constrained winter periods;
- Issues concerning the transparency of uplift and operator actions and potential ways to improve this transparency;
- Appropriate pricing of fast-start resources;
- Potentially moving to sub-hourly settlement intervals;
- Creating new products that would incent flexible capacity;
- Crafting appropriately sized Operating Reserve Zones;
- Potential effects of Uplift Allocation rules;
- Market and modeling enhancements that RTOs/ISOs can use to improve their market models;
- Potential implementation of shortage prices;
- Pricing of transient, short-duration events;
- Interchange uncertainty caused by the lag between price signals and interchange scheduling between RTOs/ISOs; and
- Any additional steps that should be taken by FERC and/or the industry.
Comments are due February 19, 2015 by 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. FERC Staff emphasizes that commenters are not required to answer all of the questions in order to provide comments.
To view the notice, click here.
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