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Outside of the California ISO, the market for energy in the Western Interconnection is based on bilateral transactions between market participants. While this market functionality has served the West well for decades, there is potential to allow for greater exchanges of energy with coordinated dispatch and congestion management practices.

This potential is magnified by the emergence of significant levels of variable energy production resources. The variable resources highlight the need for better tools to manage flows through coordinated dispatch and to increase balancing area efficiency for generation and load balancing.

Efforts are underway to evaluate a proposed Energy Imbalance Service (EIS) market platform in the West, based on the design of the existing EIS market used in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP).

The SPP EIS market reduces overall production costs by taking offers from generators and dispatching the most efficient generators first, thereby reducing overall costs. In doing so, the EIS market takes into consideration the specific location of generation and the transmission network capable of transporting the generation to load. The EIS market improves reliability by allowing the SPP to redispatch resources when the actual generator output causes congestion and overloading of transmission lines. SPP dispatches all of the offered generation (while taking into account the self scheduled generation) necessary to serve the forecasted load of the footprint.

The SPP market uses a five minute dispatch and physical transmission rights to serve the members’ energy requirements. Because the EIS uses short-term load forecasting to anticipate the balancing requirements, the region captures a diversity benefit that mitigates the balancing area burden for integrating variable energy resources.

The broad goal of the EIS Market Investigation Work Group (EISWG) is to understand the basic fundamentals of an EIS market to determine whether implementation of such a proposal would provide benefits to the WestConnect members. This understanding will be gained by, among other things, education of market participants, review of tariff language proposals, results from the WECC-sponsored cost/benefit study and, most importantly, coordination with other WestConnect and related work groups, EISWG work group member and market participant feedback.

The EISWG will use this knowledge to educate and make recommendations to the WestConnect Steering Committee about the ultimate evolution of an EIS-style market for the WestConnect footprint.

Supporting Documentation

PUC - EIM Workgroup Webinar Recordings and Upcoming Webinars

Work Group Chairman

Joe Taylor, Xcel Energy

Contact us

For additional Information contact Joe Taylor

 
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