The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) Board of Governors and Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM) Governing Body recently approved an initial set of market enhancements to help ensure WEIM balancing authority areas bring sufficient capacity and energy to the real-time energy market to meet their demand, CAISO reported on Feb. 10.
In May 2021, CAISO and its stakeholders began the WEIM Resource Sufficiency Evaluation Enhancements Phase 1 initiative.
According to CAISO, the initiative took a holistic view of the process to identify enhancements that would improve the accuracy of the evaluations to ensure balancing authority areas in the WEIM bring sufficient capacity and energy to meet their demand without relying on WEIM transfers.
The enhancements, which will be implemented this summer, include:
- Accurately counting resources offered for use in the real-time market;
- Modifying how imports will be counted toward resource sufficiency; and
- Enabling demand response programs to be considered as part of the resource sufficiency evaluation for WEIM entities.
CAISO said the newly adopted enhancements will increase transparency by providing the WEIM participants with more of the data used in the resource sufficiency evaluation, which will help each balancing authority understand how their schedules and bids performed and improve their ability to be successful in future evaluations.
The grid operator said that it will continue to engage market participants and stakeholders as they assess additional enhancements, including an analysis of how load adjustments should be considered in the process and defining the consequences should a WEIM entity fail to pass the resource sufficiency evaluation.
