New York's power grid operator said Monday it will solicit a reliability solution from the Long Island Power Authority associated with two natural gas units scheduled to be closed in November.
In accordance with its tariff, the New York Independent System Operator notified stakeholders that a generation deactivation assessment identified two reliability needs associated with J-Power Generation's planned retirement of the Pilgrim GT1 and Pilgrim GT2 turbines located in Long Island.
J-Power notified NYISO in March that it plans to retire the two 50-MW capacity gas turbines on November 1.
As a result, NYISO said it will solicit a regulated, non-generation generator deactivation solution "solely from a Responsible Transmission Owner" because the reliability issue needs to be addressed in the short term and is not part of the bulk power transmission system, but part of the local system owned by the Long Island Power Authority.
LIPA is the responsible transmission owner because the reliability needs arise on two of the 69 kV circuits located within its transmission district. NYISO said in the notice to its stakeholders that its assessment considered operational procedures that could alleviate the reliability issue, but none were identified. Specifically, LIPA considered dispatching a "significant level of additional generation from units located east of Northport to reduce the overload levels," but when NYISO reviewed LIPA's redispatch recommendations intended to reduce the thermal violations they were not "consistent with acceptable normal NYISO operating procedures."
So LIPA will need to propose another solution, though it is not clear what that will be at this point. The issue will be discussed at the Thursday meeting of the NYISO Electric System Planning Working Group and Transmission Planning Advisory Subcommittee.
The gas units are located in NYISO zone K, where day-ahead prices on Monday afternoon were $56.53/MWh, the highest in the system at the time.
