No Coal No Gas and our friends from across New England submitted hundreds of comments opposing ISO New England’s FCA 17 results. FERC ultimately approved FCA 17 results, claiming that our comments were outside the scope of this proceeding.
ISO-NE (Independent systems operator - New England) and FERC (federal energy regulatory commission) may continue to claim our objections to fossil fuel subsidies on the grounds of negative climate impacts are beyond the scope of this proceeding - but that doesn’t deter us. We will continue to put pressure on ISO and FERC until we stop burning coal and gas in this region. Below are some of the highlights from No Coal No Gas’s official filings to FERC and letters to the office of public participation.
Comment to Office of Public Participation
Dear Office of Public Participation,
We are reaching out on behalf of the No Coal No Gas campaign to report the results of our recent comment initiative opposing ISO New England’s FCA 17 results. Over the last few weeks, we organized 424 individuals and 5 organizations to submit comments to docket #ER23-1435-000. 163 comments (including No Coal No Gas’s own statement and motion to intervene) were filed to the docket directly, while an additional 289 (several of them duplicates) were collected and uploaded by NCNG campaign supporter Drew Hudson at 198methods.org. This mass filing was our attempt to make the process more accessible to folks who wanted to comment but could not figure out the submission process on their own.
In total, we count that our campaign and its allies were responsible for 424 unique comments submitted to the comment period! This is a large increase from last year, we think in part because of our various accessibility efforts. These efforts included a comprehensive toolkit, as well as this portal which allowed people to participate in the mass filing. Since the close of the official FERC comment period, several people have continued to use the portal- an indication of the widespread interest in this process beyond official avenues for public participation.
Clearly, the people of New England are excited to engage in FERC processes and would welcome additional opportunities to do so. We hope that this data will be helpful to you in your continued public engagement efforts! We are attaching our official campaign statement on the Forward Capacity Auction, as well as copies of all the comments that have been submitted in our comment drive (including those that were unable to be submitted due to technical difficulties or short deadlines). We hope this will give you at the OPP a full and accurate sense of the degree of public engagement in our region. Our comment project was also covered in RTO Insider- you can read the article here.
Thank you so much for all that you do! We look forward to continued collaboration with you!
Sincerely,
The No Coal No Gas Campaign
No Coal No Gas Motion to Intervene
Pursuant to Section 214 of the Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“Commission”), 18 C.F.R. § 385.214 (2021), Combined Notice of Filings #1 of March 22, 2022, No Coal No Gas, hereby moves to intervene in the above-captioned proceeding that relates to a filing made by ISO New England Inc. on March 21, 2022. No Coal No Gas (NCNG) is a regional coalition with over 1600 members, including residents from all New England States. NCNG’s mission is to advocate for the interests of New England ratepayers by accelerating the grid’s transition away from fossil fuels. NCNG and its affiliate members will be directly materially affected by any action taken by the Commission in these proceedings and thus have an interest in the outcome. This interest cannot be adequately represented by any other party, as other parties involved in the process (including those directly tasked with decision-making about the grid) have repeatedly deemed NCNG’s concerns about the risk of climate change and the health impacts of fossil fuels as “outside the scope of these proceedings.” NCNG continues to maintain that calling an existential threat to grid reliability, collective human survival, and all life on Earth “outside the scope” of grid management policy is absurd. NCNG’s participation in this proceeding will serve the public interest by ensuring that the actions necessary to the survival of our members, all other participants in this docket, and life as we know it are adequately considered. Good cause thus exists for this motion, and NCNG respectfully requests that the Commission grant its motion to intervene.
No Coal No Gas Statement/Comment in Opposition to the results of ISO-NE’s 17th Forward Capacity Auction, docket #ER23-1435-000
May 3, 2023
Dear FERC Commissioners,
On behalf of the No Coal No Gas campaign, we are writing to ask that you reject the results of ISO-New England’s 17th Forward Capacity Auction (FCA 17). First, we are pleased that the current results exclude Merrimack Station from this round of forward capacity payments. This is a massive step in the right direction, and we are grateful that our utility bills will not be used to subsidize coal as of June 2026.
However, ISO-NE’s Forward Capacity Market structure, particularly the continued payments to fossil fuel generators, poses extreme risk to ratepayers, the climate, and grid reliability. FCA 17 promises $946 million of our ratepayer electric bills to power plants – many of them base load generators that don’t need subsidies to be profitable. FCA 17 awards hundreds of millions of ratepayer dollars to keep the oldest, dirtiest, least economical fossil fuel powered generators online for use as peaker plants. By propping up these failing fossil fuel powered generators as stand-by peaker plants and sending bonus payments to base load generators, ISO-NE is preventing a just transition on our dime, and we call on FERC to intervene.
ISO-NE’s continued funding of fossil fuels violates its mandate by subsidizing and securing the fossil fuel industry at a massive cost to ratepayers, grid reliability, and the climate. We call on ISO-NE and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reject forward capacity payments to all fossil fuel powered generators. We also ask that FERC require ISO-NE to restructure or abolish the Forward Capacity Market (FCM) to deprioritize fossil fuels and promote a just transition to renewable energy. This involves canceling MOPR immediately and taking environmental justice into account in all future policy decisions. Finally, we demand that ISO-NE expand and prioritize conservation demand response (industrial, aggregated, and individual) and further engage ratepayers in reducing demand on the regional grid.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has the responsibility to oversee ISO-NE’s mandate, ensuring it performs “three critical roles” for the New England Grid: “Grid operation, market administration, and power system planning.” As ISO-NE’s mission states, “Together, these three responsibilities help protect the health of the region’s economy and the well-being of its people by ensuring the constant availability of competitively-priced wholesale electricity – today and for future generations.” FCA-17’s results fail this mission. The continued funding of expensive, dangerous, and unreliable fossil fuel generators undermines the economic health of New England’s ratepayers and threatens grid reliability for years to come. Most of all, it abandons a commitment to the wellbeing of the region’s people now, and delays or denies a transition to a system that ensures that wellbeing for future generations.
As ratepayers, we are concerned about the governance process that allows ISO-NE to fund fossil fuels instead of a just transition to clean renewable energy. In a 2019 study for the Sustainable FERC Project, Rob Gramlich and Michael Goggin note a “systemic bias” at Regional Transmission Organizations, writing that ISOs “are not well-suited to making public policy decisions because they respond primarily to industry stakeholders and are not accountable to voters.” ISO-NE consistently demonstrates their loyalty to industry over voters and ratepayers by insisting on more fossil fuels as the solution to many grid-related problems. As gas prices rise and electricity bills skyrocket, spokespeople for ISO-NE are not sticking up for the needs of New England residents. Instead, they’re advocating for more fossil fuels. ISO-NE’s policy of valuing all electricity equally (so-called “electron-neutrality”) is a dangerous fiction.
Current ISO-NE policies and market procedures show consistent bias toward fossil fuels over renewables. According to Gramlich and Goggin’s whitepaper, “capacity markets have built-in biases against renewable energy” that “work against efforts to decarbonize” by consistently underestimating potential capacity and reliability from renewables and battery storage while overstating the capacity and reliability of fossil fuel generators. This results in massive forward capacity payments in fossil fuels and significantly less investment in potential climate solutions. Without ratepayer-funded subsidies like those provided through the ISO-NE forward capacity auction, many fossil fuel powered generators would retire permanently, as they are simply too costly and too dirty to run. For these reasons, the United Kingdom has even classified forward capacity markets as illegal subsidies for power generators. Through its consistent bias against renewables, ISO-NE’s current FCM disincentivizes a just transition in favor of fossil fuel profits.
ISO-NE’s bias toward fossil fuels is a major justice issue. As climate change worsens, Black, Indigenous, poor, working class, and disabled ratepayers are most at risk from extreme weather events, pollution, grid failures, and economic injustice. The cost of forward capacity payments could be removed from ratepayer bills entirely, or directed toward efficiency, conservation, low-income energy assistance, and renewable energy projects. Instead, fossil fuel billionaires make money from subsidizing payments to fossil fuel generators, and the rest of us – especially the region’s most vulnerable residents – are paying the price. On average, 10-20% of our electric bills are used as fossil fuel subsidies that keep outdated, dirty electricity on the grid. This figure continues to rise even higher in recent years. ISO-NE should be using our ratepayer dollars to invest in New England’s collective future, not propping up a dangerous, out-of-date industry.
Beyond being expensive, forward capacity payments to fossil fuels are a major threat to grid reliability. According to a 2017 Rhodium Group report, US power outages are not usually the result of insufficient capacity, but when they are, fossil fuel supplies are most likely to fail. Fossil fuel infrastructure also contributes directly to grid unreliability by accelerating climate change. This Connecticut case study predicts power outage increases of 42%-64% by the end of the century due to increased heavy wind and precipitation – extreme weather events demonstrably connected to climate change. As climate change worsens, fossil fuel powered generators will become our most vulnerable sources of electricity. In their 2019 whitepaper, power sector consultants Gramlich and Goggin found that “instances of climate-driven extreme weather appear to be causing more instances of correlated forced outages among conventional generators.” Yet despite these shortcomings, ISO-NE continues to prioritize fracked gas usage and infrastructure development.
Instead of providing the flexibility and diversity of resources that would allow our grid to adapt to changing conditions, New England’s current market design has driven the growth of gas above all else. Gramlich and Goggin write that the flexibility to respond to changing conditions is key to a reliable energy grid, and that such flexibility can be best provided by a diverse array of generation from renewables. But instead of promoting diverse and flexible electricity generation, ISO-NE’s FCM supports fracked gas above all else. Last winter, this overreliance on gas resulted in a crisis when gas shortages led to rate hikes and widespread regulator panic about rolling blackouts.
The failure of gas and oil to deliver when they were most needed was on stark display on December 24, 2022, across the New England grid. On that date wholesale prices soared over $2,000/MWh across the entire region. In addition to widespread freezing-induced fossil fuel power plant equipment failures that caused those generators to fall short of capacity supply obligations on that day, about 15% of an approximately 2.3 GW reserve margin shortfall was due to what ISO's COO referred to as "scheduling issues" "Gas Scheduling issues" refers to gas that is contractually unavailable even as it's physically stranded in the pipe. December 24, 2022 was a multiple fossil fuel power plant failure compounded by a market failure, not a gas supply shortage. Oil and gas power were not reliable when they most needed to be.
The flip side of the Dec 24, 2022 grid debacle is the realization that energy democracy, or the exercise of ratepayer power, is sufficient to ensure the reliability that fossil peaker plants could not. If six million New England ratepayers each avoided using 150-200 watts during the peak demand period on December 24, 2022, the avoided usage would have completely wiped out the 2.3 GW shortfall, and Christmas Eve would have been "normal" on the grid. That's the equivalent of each household running a microwave on medium-high instead of high.
Ratepayers have the agency, metering tools, and social network tools to form powerful virtual, collective, utility scale grid resources, including demand response, storage, and renewable generation. FERC must recognize that the tools of energy democracy are at hand and that energy democracy will promote widespread local resilience, cleaner air and a livable climate, and distributed rather than concentrated economic benefits.
Our region isn’t the only place where fracked gas falls short – blackouts in Texas have also demonstrated how overreliance on gas threatens infrastructure, affordability, and even people’s lives. It is irresponsible, dangerous, and poor grid management to support fossil fuel generators that can only provide electricity in a way that drives climate change and grid instability.
When we’ve raised these concerns in the past, ISO-NE has consistently claimed that our concerns were “outside the scope of the proceedings.” This could not be further from the truth. As No Coal No Gas’s 2022 filing argued, the reality of climate change is central to these proceedings as it concerns “the fundamental facts upon which they are based”—the very nature of our region’s climate, economy, and electric grid. Growing climate instability is as relevant to grid management as both regional energy demand and the value of the United States dollar. Based on blatantly inaccurate assumptions about the capacity, reliability, and sustainability of fossil fuel powered generators, the FCA 17 results not only violate ISO-NE’s mandate, but also call into question the legitimacy of the FCM as a whole. Thus, the arguments made in No Coal No Gas’s protests and comments are directly relevant to whether the ISO-NE followed its Tariff when it conducted FCA 17.
Each time it is confronted with the reality of climate injustice and the necessity of a transition to renewables, ISO-NE frets over “the scope of its Tariff,” “electron-neutrality,” “jurisdictional limits” and “infringement on state decision making processes.” However, these concerns miraculously disappear when it comes to support for fossil fuels. In fact, ISO-NE steps outside the bounds of its authority when it comes to the Minimum Offer Price Rule. In 2019, Sustainable FERC Project found that “With expansion of MOPR, RTO/ISOs are expanding their mission into energy policy and price management. Neither of these were the roles outlined for ISOs or RTOs when they were created. Nothing in FERC’s Order No. 888 ISO Principles…says anything about mitigating state policy.” ISO policies that penalize renewables for “subsidies” while simultaneously prioritizing funds for fossil fuels contradict the legislation being passed in the New England states. ISO-NE’s decision to undermine state renewable portfolio standards shows that it does in fact have the jurisdictional scope to step beyond “electron-neutrality.” Regulators at ISO-NE are already deciding which fuels are supported on our grid.
It is clear that ISO-NE’s continued funding of fossil fuels actively undermines their mission of grid reliability, affordable energy, and ratepayer wellbeing. We can only conclude that ISO-NE has experienced complete corporate capture of their stakeholder decision-making process. FERC’s Standard Market Design proposal states “We are concerned that the existing stakeholder process may not provide adequate representation for all market participants and interested parties. The lack of adequate representation may hinder development of alternative energy resources, such as distributed generation, renewable energy, or demand response programs, since these programs may be contrary to the business interests of certain market participants.” Clearly, ISO-NE is incapable of conducting a fair forward capacity auction, as fossil fuel interests dominate their formal stakeholder processes, thus ensuring their profits and restricting competition. When former Maryland governor, Martin O’Malley compared ISOs to “legal cartels” where major competitors restrict trade and “stymie [states’] clean energy policies,” this was not an exaggeration. We call on the FERC Commissioners to intervene.
It’s time for you to act. Gramlich and Goggin argue that “FERC could end its practice of providing excessive deference to RTOs and ISOs and review proposals more carefully by exercising its FPA Section 206 authority to find rules are unjust and unreasonable.” Clearly, ISO-NE’s FCA-17 results are unjust and unreasonable, as they sacrifice the reliability of New England’s grid and the wellbeing of its people in favor of the status quo fossil fuel funding. FERC’s mission states the responsibility to “ensure reliable, safe, secure & economically efficient energy for consumers at a reasonable cost through appropriate regulatory and market means, and collaborative efforts.” Allowing future forward capacity payments to fossil fuels violates the Commission's mission and responsibility, requiring ratepayers to fund dangerous, unreliable, and inefficient generators. The decision-making process that resulted in such payments also threatens FERC’s commitment to “appropriate regulatory and market means,” as it is inaccessible and unfair to both ratepayers and renewable energy companies. There are better options than ISO-NE’s current FCM system, and we are ready to pursue them.
ISO-NE is free to restructure its long-term grid reliability planning. This should start immediately, and begin with either the complete abolition or a major overhaul of the Forward Capacity Market. It’s time to allow the dirtiest legacy generators to retire and shift payments to efficiency, conservation, and renewable energy projects. These shifts would all support long-term grid reliability, job creation, and reduced emissions. This is absolutely possible, since ISO NE is permitted to change its forward capacity market system in order to better meet grid reliability needs. The immediate elimination of MOPR would also go a long way toward making the current FCM system more reliable and “electron-neutral.” Most of all, ISO-NE could focus on conservation demand response, including voluntary participation from households, instead of attempting to provide limitless electricity.
New England ratepayers are ready for change. We don’t want to be passive “consumers” in this system anymore – recent participation in the Consumer Liaison Group (CLG) has shown as much. We know that we are the source of forward capacity funding, and we know that we are also a large source of demand. We aren’t willing to fund fossil fuels with our utility bills any longer, and we aren’t willing to allow ISO-NE to exacerbate climate change in our name. We want to be part of the solution. Instead of adding more and more electricity to the grid, it’s time for ISO-NE to focus on conservation and demand reduction. Gramlich and Goggin write that “The original intent of capacity markets was that they would be temporary, and fade away as demand response was developed.”
IT IS LONG PAST TIME to develop and prioritize the demand response side of this equation. ISO-NE could do this by:
1. Activating industry conservation demand response contracts BEFORE peak load generator contracts are activated, effectively making sure that demand is reduced before new electricity is added to the grid.
2. Working with the CLG to co-sponsor a more robust program of opt-in household, public sector, and community ratepayer conservation demand response.
3. Implementing smart meters and other technology that will further reduce demand and unnecessary capacity usage.
Together, these conservation-focused approaches to demand response (industrial, aggregated, and household) could reduce costs and make our communities more sustainable. We are personally excited to participate in “shaving the peak” by reducing our electricity usage when called upon to do so, and we will actively encourage our fellow ratepayers to join us. We are ready to do our part in a just grid transition and ask that FERC and ISO-NE collaborate with us to make this possible.
It is long past time for the Forward Capacity Market as we know it to be abolished. We must replace it with a system that prioritizes climate justice and actual grid reliability, not exclusive insider profit at the expense of a livable climate. In order to better meet your stated mission to ensure grid reliability, affordability, and support for current and future generations, we call on FERC to reject the results of ISO-NE’s FCA 17, specifically forward capacity payments to fossil fuel powered generators, expand conservation demand response, and enact a just transition to renewable generation.
We call on FERC and ISO-NE to step into your power as the federal and regional decision making bodies on these issues with a determination that ensuring collective survival is within the scope of your authority.
Finally, we call on ISO-NE to meaningfully engage ratepayers as it plans for the grid of the future – not in a patronizing way that assumes our priorities, but through active collaboration on shared visions and needs. It is time to work together to transition to the grid of the future.
Sincerely,
The No Coal No Gas Campaign
nocoalnogas.org
