On May 18, 2017, ISO New England Inc. (“ISO-NE”) and the New England Power Pool Participants Committee (together with ISO-NE, the “Filing Parties”) proposed revisions to the ISO-NE/New York Independent System Operator, Inc. (“NYISO”) Coordination Agreement (the “NE/NY Coordination Agreement”) and the term sheet indicating the price of emergency energy sold to Hydro-Quebec Transenergie (“HQTE”) by ISO-NE (the “HQTE EE Pricing Schedule”) to reflect changes that were implemented to ISO-NE’s Market Rule regarding emergency energy purchases and sales.  The NE/NY Coordination Agreement specifies, among other things, the terms and conditions under which a control area will provide energy to the neighboring control area during emergency conditions.  These terms and conditions include the price one control area will charge the other for providing emergency energy. 

In March 2017, ISO-NE implemented sub-hourly settlement revisions, which aligned the settlement interval in ISO-NE’s Energy Market with the five-minute energy and reserve pricing intervals.  These revisions included changes to the ISO-NE Market Rule addressing the settlement of emergency energy purchases and sales with neighboring control areas.  However, the sub-hourly settlement revisions did not update the emergency energy pricing provisions in the agreements with neighboring control areas, including the NE/NY Coordination Agreement.  The Filing Parties thus state they are proposing modifications to the NE/NY Coordination Agreement and HQTE EE Pricing Schedule to reflect sub-hourly settlements and make other minor revisions.

In particular, the Filing Parties propose the following revisions to the NE/NY Coordination Agreement and the HQTE EE Pricing Schedule:

• Updates to reflect that settlement of sales of emergency energy will be performed for each five-minute interval in which emergency energy is provided to the neighboring control area using five-minute Locational Marginal Prices (“LMPs”) at the external pricing node;

• Modifications to include the statement that, for purposes of the pricing calculation, “an LMP in a settlement interval is set to $0.00 if the LMP in the settlement interval was negative” to ensure that ISO-NE market participants are not responsible for paying the cost of emergency energy provided to NYISO or HQTE if the price of energy is negative;

• Non-substantive language clarifications to the HQTE EE Pricing Schedule to simplify and clarify the language to better reflect its intent; and

• Two minor changes to the body of the NE/NY Coordination Agreement —one to the definition of the term “Transfer Limit” and one to the provisions addressing the treatment of confidential information.

The requested effective date for the proposed revisions is August 1, 2017.  A copy of the filing is available here.