Brief Observations from NYISO's Zonal & Resource Uplift Reports

As part of FERC Order 844 compliance, NYISO began publishing two new monthly reports this year – one that summarizes Zonal uplift by market day, and one that gives resource-specific uplift by market month. These reports are updated on the 15th of every month, and follow two slightly different time-frames – the Zonal report gives data for the most recently completed month while the Resource report has data from 2.5 months back.

NYISO's two reports converted into an interactive dashboard can be found here.

Not surprisingly, the resources that show up in the reports are highly correlated with those that appear under the NYISO Operator Initiated Commitment report (or NYISO Operational Announcements for older dates). The DARUs associated with LRRs in NYC drive the bulk of DAM Bid Production Cost Guarantee (BPCG) while SREs and OOM commitments, primarily in NYC and Long Island, drive the Balancing BPCG.

These reliability commitments and associated uplift payments are not ideal as they can stifle investment on the developer side by not sending appropriate price signals and make hedging costs more difficult on the load side (though some of the costs can be predicted). Depending on how ancillary services market enhancements (such as “load pocket reserves”) and carbon pricing shake out the next couple years, a chunk of these costs could move to market prices and away from uplift.

Data observations:

• NYC Zone DARUs drive DAM BPCG
• NYC/L.I./North Zones SREs & OOMs drive Balancing BPCG
• DAM BPCG is roughly consistent through the time period while Balancing BPCG spiked in July as SRE & OOM activity picked up
• There's no dominant pattern for DAM Contract Balancing (presumably day ahead margin assurance payments). Higher days seem to generally occur in Winter/Summer, but the largest single day comes from a shoulder period (late March). DAMAP is an indication of unexpected events and/or RT volatility so correlating with higher load would make sense. As far as the shoulder period occurrences, this could happen when West Zone congestion pops up in shoulder periods, but further analysis would be necessary to confirm.
• Just one MOB event so far this summer – 7/17/2019