AEI ISO Alerts 2023 Service Notice

Carlisle, MA -- May 22, 2023 -- AEI will be resuming its free ISO Alert service to help subscribers avoid coincident peaks with the electric power grid during the coming months of warm weather and heavy demand. The service will resume on Monday, June 12th 19th, 2023 and continue through the last Friday in September.

New Peaks are Happening Daily

As usual for the start of the season, new 2023 peaks are happening on a routine basis on all 7 domestic systems we track, but it's very early in the season and most have barely passed 50% of their expected annual peak for this year. SMS alerts will only be sent when demands exceed a minimum floor we have set for each system in an effort to minimize annoying false positives. For your planning purposes, we are publishing the minimum floor levels that must be exceeded before we will issue any alerts that have a decent chance of being within striking distance of a recent annual peak. These levels are arbitrarily determined by taking 90% of the lowest peak load in the past 5 years. You can make this calculation for your ISO by looking at the five-year history for each ISO on our AEI ISO Alerts webpage.

As an example, The lowest 5-minute peak load for ISO New England in the past 5 years was 24,075 MW back on July 30, 2019. We calculate 90% of that load (21,669 MW) as the minimum threshold to be met before alerts are sent. Therefore, if ISO New England were to project a peak load of 21,169 MW on certain day, that would be about 500 MW lower than our projected minimum level for this season and no alerts will be issued on that day if their peak projected load is accurate. On some later day, if system loads exceed 21,669 MW, then our minimum floor level will have been reached and alerting will commence for the season. Alerts are issued by SMS text message in the hours before an anticipated new high for the year. In summary, the first alerts you see in the early part of the season are unlikely to be the final annual peak loads but it cannot hurt to use them to rehearse your DR protocols.

Customize Your Morning Report Delivery

With a new feature introduced in 2020, you are able to change the "Minimum Morning Report Rating" from "1" to "2 or higher" if you prefer not to hear from us on those days when the grid rating is a 1 out of 5. Statistically speaking, there will usually be less than 10 days during the next four months where a given grid will have a rating of 2 or higher. You can eliminate most of the morning reports by changing this setting from a "1" to "2 or higher". While we can never guarantee that a peak hour will not occur on a day rated 1 out of 5, it's never happened in the past seven years since we implemented our tracking system. If you are configured to receive SMS alerts, you will still get those if there is a sudden peak that was not forecast by the ISO. To change this setting, use the link at the bottom of any Morning Report email you receive going forward.

Capacity Charges

The good news again for this year is that capacity charges in New England continue to drop, down to $2.00 per kW-month this year versus $3.80 last year. 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, RCP prices this year are also down to $34.13 (from $50, and down from $140 back in 2021/22) per mW-day, but just the same we continue to advise that you do whatever it takes to avoid coincident peaks because of variability across the different LDAs. Several sources are also predicting lower gas prices and lower electricity demand thanks to cooler temperatures over the coming weeks and into the cooling season. According to EIA, more of that reduced demand will be coming from natural gas and renewables. Even while demand appears to be softening, retail electricity costs will remain higher than before the pandemic.

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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