Dive Brief:
- The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Wednesday approved a 1-year delay to ISO New England’s 19th Forward Capacity Auction, or FCA, concluding the additional time will allow development of a revised capacity accreditation methodology that accounts for the region’s changing resource mix.
- FCA 19 had been scheduled for February 2025, to secure resource obligations for the 2028-2029 capacity year. The auction will now take place in 2026, but the change does not affect FCA 18, which is scheduled to take place next month.
- The ISO and the New England Power Pool’s, or NEPOOL, Participants Committee requested the auction delay in November, telling federal regulators the accreditation methodology must be updated “to capture the impact of the constrained natural gas delivery system” on winter energy needs.
Dive Insight:
The energy transition “is happening now,” the ISO and NEPOOL told federal regulators, leading the wholesale market to require adjustments to its auction processes.
Through the end of the FCA 19 delivery period — June 2028 through May 2029 — battery storage, solar and offshore wind resources “will comprise the vast majority of the proposed projects” in New England’s interconnection queue, grid officials said. “The region is also poised to experience a significant increase in winter energy demand.”
The ISO had requested additional time to develop an updated capacity accreditation methodology “to capture the impact of the constrained natural gas delivery system on the ability of natural gas-fired resources to deliver energy during the winter, when those constraints are greatest.”
Capacity accreditation assesses how individual resources contribute to meet a system’s resource adequacy requirements.
FERC on Wednesday said the delay was reasonable.
“The requested delay will allow ISO-NE the time necessary to develop a revised capacity accreditation methodology, in addition to further potential changes to the FCM design,” the commission said.
The ISO began working with New England stakeholders in 2021 to develop a new Marginal Reliability Impact methodology for accrediting capacity resources, but those reforms will not be ready by next February. Instead, FCA 19 will take place in 2026 and “all other pre-auction and post-auction deadlines will remain the same during the qualification process, except that each deadline will take place one calendar year later,” according to FERC’s decision.
