The new market, slated to go live on Dec. 1, will include both day-ahead and real-time electricity prices traded much the same way as in the PJM (the former Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland), New York and New England markets, said James Torgerson, president and chief executive of the Midwest ISO.
In those markets, generators offer to sell energy from each of their power plants at a given price. The grid operator then selects which plants it will buy power from, starting with the lowest bid, until they have bought enough to meet the region's estimated energy needs.
During the briefing, Torgerson, joined by U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Pat Wood, also discussed several reliability enhancements to avoid outages like the one last summer that knocked out power to about 50 million people in the United States and Canada.
To bolster the system, the grid operator added several computers and programs that constantly monitor more than 85,000 points along the transmission system.
The computers will help the grid operator recognize when power lines and plants fail and recommend the best steps to take to prevent outages from cascading across regional grids.
Asked whether the new systems would have helped the Midwest ISO avoid the Aug. 14 blackout, the Midwest ISO's Torgerson said the extent of the outages would likely have been reduced or prevented if the new equipment were available.
FERC's Wood, however, noted that no computer system could prevent a power line from failing when it touches a tree branch.
The U.S.-Canadian Power System Outage Task Force determined that a key cause
of the blackout was Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp.'s
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