Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO)’s Independent Market Monitor Potomac Economics’ Dr Patton has proposed penalizing renewable resources. His proposal endorses “marginal” effective load carrying capability calculation to calculate capacity credit for renewables. A marginal calculation reduces the amount of capacity credit compared to the average calculation. MISO currently uses the average ELCC for calculating capacity credit for wind.
One of Dr Patton’s reasons behind proposing a marginal capacity accreditation compared to an average method is that average accreditation leads to excess payments which lead to inflated consumer costs. But if that’s true, why has he not raised this issue so far at MISO?
He also says the average method leads to under-investment in resources with greater reliability benefits (including storage-paired renewables, longer duration storage) and over-investment in resources with diminishing reliability benefits (undiversified intermittent type, shorter duration storage, retention of gas-only thermal generation). Again, if that’s true, why does MISO have 769 projects in the interconnection queue with more than 100 GW of capacity? Most of these projects are solar and storage. https://cdn.misoenergy.org/GIQ%20Web%20Overview272899.pdf
Dr Patton’s proposal follows a pattern in the industry at present, which is, when it comes to renewables and energy storage - we want to propose a new method to calculate capacity credits accurately. But when it comes to thermal resources, let’s act as if everything is OK even though recent NERC FERC reports point out the deficiencies of relying on natural gas units and pipelines.