The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has granted a request by New England's grid operator and a regional utilities association to postpone their 2025 forward capacity auction by a year.
In November 2023, ISO New England and the New England Power Pool (NEPOOL) had sought the U.S. energy regulator's permission to delay the auction to finish assessing how much power capacity their resources can contribute.
The auction, which will secure obligations from resources to be available during the 2028/2029 capacity year, will be held in February 2026, with the qualification process starting in early 2025, FERC said in a filing on Tuesday.
In 2021, ISO-NE undertook a multi-year project to revamp how it calculates the power that a resource can be reasonably expected to produce during peak conditions in the future, to account for changing circumstances, such as outage rates, maximum storage, winter risks and fuel availability.
The completion of this capacity re-evaluation was slowed by a problem with modelling winter natural gas resource capability, said ISO-NE, which said it expects to file its new capacity accreditation design for FERC's approval in August 2024.
In a separate joint statement in November, FERC and the North American Electric Reliability Corp said the reliability of New England's energy supply during extreme cold weather could be jeopardised if the Everett Marine LNG terminal closes down.
A study by ISO-NE found the region will require large amounts of clean energy alongside some traditional power resources and robust transmission to maintain a reliable supply of electricity while the transition to lower carbon energy takes place.
