NYISO BLOG

The NYISO convened its Environmental Advisory Council in late October to discuss timely issues associated with the state’s climate policy goals: grid reliability in the face of energy intensive economic development projects, and the continued need for additional investment in clean energy.

How will the demand for electricity, a changing generation mix, and the transmission system evolve over the next 10 years? This is the question that our Reliability Needs Assessment (RNA) examines in order to assess and identify impacts to reliability.

When the NYISO was first created in 1999 to run the power grid and wholesale electric markets for New York, it was structured as an independent entity serving under a transparent, shared governance platform approved and overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). An independent approach, it was believed, would best serve the interests of consumers and system reliability while also preventing any one entity or industry from unduly influencing operation of the system or market outcomes.

Going above and beyond is an essential part of the job for the NYISO’s Stakeholder Services team, which works every day to solve problems for market participants and stakeholders in a quickly changing electric industry.

The NYISO has provided a 30-day extension for resolving insufficient applications in its new interconnection process. The streamlined process is designed to accommodate a larger volume of renewable energy resources seeking to connect to the grid since the passage of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019.

As the diversity and scale of energy resources have evolved in recent years, NYISO’s market design team has been working hard to create and implement market innovations to support those technologies.

Growing up in Hefei, China, Wenjin Yan often watched her father, an electrical engineer, rush out the door to address a problem on the power grid.

The AC Transmission Projects, completed in 2023, have improved energy deliverability in so-called “wind pockets,” parts of New York where more renewable energy is produced than can be delivered to consumers.

Brandon Cheely loves figuring how to optimize performance – whether it’s the software that runs electricity markets or the team he manages at the NYISO.

In the NYISO’s wholesale markets, the cost of a megawatt hour (MWh) of energy can be understood as a combination of two parts: the energy price and the capacity price. One megawatt can power 800-1,000 homes.

Our mission at the NYISO is to ensure power system reliability and competitive markets for New York in a clean-energy future, and to work with all stakeholders to build the cleanest, most reliable electric system in the nation.

The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) has made significant improvements and enhancements to the interconnection process, crucial for integrating a high volume of new generation facilities onto the grid.

There has been an unprecedented increase in the number of new generation projects seeking to connect to the bulk power system since the passage of the CLCPA in 2019. As the grid evolves, careful coordination and thorough analysis is required to safely and reliably connect new resources to the system.

One of the things that distinguishes the NYISO is our culture of giving. Serving New Yorkers with reliable power is part of our mission, but going beyond that is something HR Manager Sarah Knox knows a lot about.

When we talk about building a more sustainable future, the journey is as important as the destination. Steering the electric grid through these monumental changes requires leadership and creativity.

Participants and other stakeholders in NYISO-administered wholesale electricity markets count on experts like Mathangi Srinivasan for training. Whether they attend course offerings as a refresher, or are starting with basics, Mathangi finds her role as a Market Training Program Lead to be very fulfilling.

Our operators who oversee New York’s power grid are like “a lifeguard on the ocean,” says Jon Sawyer, Director of Grid Operations at the NYISO. “You're monitoring, you're tracking, but when an emergency happens ‘right now’ you've got to go do something.”

“For the past few years an overwhelming number of clean energy requests have rushed into our interconnection queue with a process that was not originally designed for this large volume of requests,” says Manager of Facilities Study, Wenjin Yan. The interconnection queue is an important piece in helping meet the state’s policy goals. In this new video series, we highlight the efforts underway to improve and expedite the connection of more renewable energy to the grid.

(PictureL-R: Cheryl L. Hussey, Vice President & CFO; Tara Lefevre, Senior Manager, Control Room Operations; Deneen Byrne, Vice President of Human Resources; Emilie Nelson, Executive Vice President & COO; Yachi Lin, Director, System Planning; Karen G. Gach, Deputy General Counsel; Juliann Madara, Director of Internal Audit) From an engineering perspective, the electric system in New York has until recently looked largely as it did in 1882 when Thomas Edison launched the world’s first cogeneration plant in lower Manhattan.

As we recently highlighted, there was a tremendous amount of interest about the impacts of the 2024 solar eclipse on solar generation and the bulk power system here in New York.