AEI ISO Alerts 2020 Service Notice
Carlisle, MA -- June 10, 2020 -- AEI will be resuming its free ISO Alert service to help subscribers avoid coincident grid peaks during the coming months of warm weather and heavy demand on the electric power grid. The service will resume on Monday, June 15th, 2020 and continue through September 30th, 2020.
New Peaks are Happening Daily
New 2020 peaks are happening on a routine basis on all 7 domestic systems we track, but it's early in the season and only ERCOT, IESO and CAISO have hit 90% of their recent annual peaks. SMS alerts will only be sent when demands exceed a minimum floor we have set for each grid in an effort to minimize annoying false positives.
Pandemic Uncertainty
The COVID-19 pandemic adds a new wrinkle this year in terms of guessing when the annual peak hours might show up. NERC reports that all the operators are ready on the supply side, but the pandemic has put a dent in the usual maintenance routines and added uncertainty to demand forecasting. You might recall that in 2019, NYISO had 7 of its top 10 peak hours occur on the weekend of July 20-21. And 5 of ISO New England's top 10 hours were also on that weekend. With more people working from home, weekday profiles look a lot more like weekend profiles and the overall effect is that the demand curves are flattening along with a higher tendency for peaks to occur later in the day. With flatter curves, picking out a peak becomes more challenging but it's still safe to count on weather as your best indicator of future loads.
Capacity Charges
The good news for this year is that capacity charges in NE, NY and PJM are lower than last year. In New England, this year's price is $5.30 per kW-month and the most recent FCM auction for 2023/2024 resulted in a lowest-ever price of $2.00 per kW-month. This trend should show up as lower costs in your demand charges, and if they don't you really should let us look at your TOU profiles or put you in touch with our partners who can help on the supply side. For those of you in the PJM service area, prices next year will nearly double to $140 per mW-day, so this is the summer to make sure you avoid coincident peaks.
For more information, or to signup for this free service, please visit the AEI ISO Alerts website at https://www.aeintelligence.com/products-and-services/aei-iso-alerts.
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