Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: It is tight. We're on speaker.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: We are live. I don't know if we're doing anything.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Okay. Thanks

[Speaker 0]: to walk for second.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I don't

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Don't ask me. Welcome, everybody, to House Energy and Digital Infrastructure. It's Thursday, January 22, And we are here today with Sarah Adams, and I think we're. Or no. Eric might join. Definitely. Definitely with Sarah Adams of ISO New England, and we are gonna be getting an update on our regional grid and talking about all kinds of interesting stuff. So I'm representative Kathleen James from Manchester.

[Speaker 0]: Scott Campbell from six thousand.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Bailey from Louisville too. Chris Morrow, Windham, Windsor, Betty

[Speaker 0]: and Fitch. Michael Southworth, Caledonia two. Christopher Howland, Rutland four.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Dara Torre, Washington two. Bram Kleppner, Burlington. Okay.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Great. And joining us in the room? Yeah. And that's on the

[Speaker 0]: I'm Zachary Moss. I'm a student at UVM. Work the changes to this.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Great. Kathleen Molina with Downs Rockland Martin with ISO New York.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: And Danielle Eisen. I'm Greenlights journalist. Naomi Perry with the Crassing Group.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Alright. Laura Sibilia, Windham. Super. Alright.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: For the record.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: For the record, Sarah Adams, senior state policy adviser at ISO New England. I cover the state of Vermont, and thank you to chair James and to the full committee for having me in. So I will share my slides.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Great.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So I have a pretty extensive update today. I would invite all of you to ask questions throughout, if that is agreeable to the chair. And I'm happy to pause and address as we go along with the caveat that I might defer the later slide addressing the question. At the end, I do have a number of publication and opportunities for you all to engage depending on the level of engagement. We might not get to that section, but you will all have them, the links included in the deck if you want to check those out at a later date. So I'm just going to start with a really quick reminder of who we are and what we do, and then we can get a little bit deeper than we did the last time I came in to talk to you all. ISO New England is the independent system operator for the New England region in addition to Vermont. That includes Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. We're regulated by FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and under NERC, the North American Electric Reliability Coordinate Corporation, we are the reliability coordinator for New England. We are independent, it's right in the name, of the companies that participate in our markets. And we're also neutral on technology at fuel, and that is required under our tariff, which is our governing document that is filed with FERC. We have our first question. So,

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Sarah, these are trying to understand who the different entities are that are making decisions and how they are coming to be on most points. So, NERC. Who governs that? I I have a bunch more slides about nervous

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So how they relate to this. I'm gonna pause and let you do it. And and if it's still unclear, I'd be happy to expand. Oh, wait. So I just want to remind you all

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: of what our

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: mission is. We have three critical roles. First is that we operate the power system twenty four seven, three sixty five, and reliability really is our main focus that underpins everything that we do. We also administer the region's wholesale electricity markets, and we plan for the future of the power system. So that planning piece is actually what most of today's update is going to focus on. I think based on the build that I've seen proposed so far, that seems to be what this committee is most interested in. So I'm happy to answer questions about the other two roles, but for the most part today, we're going to be focusing on. R. Sibilia, I hope that this gets a little bit to your question. And then at the end, I have some more slides about intra and interregional planning that get a little bit more into NERC and also NPCC, the Northeast Power Coordinating Council. So those are two in the orange that you can see here. The orange boxes on this flow chart show the different entities that provide oversight to the ISO as we try to deliver on our three critical roles. So in addition to FERC, NERC, and NPCC, we also have an independent board of directors who provide strategic oversight on what we're doing. And then on the right side of this chart, we have our stakeholders. So we have our market stakeholders underneath HOLD, the New England Power Pool. That includes generators, transmission owners. So Velco would participate in those meetings as a transmission owner. And end users are represented typically by their state's consumer advocate. So the department in this case, and then also generators, suppliers, other folks that participate in our markets, participate in those meetings that we host. And then on the far right, this is where folks like you come in. So the legislators, various state offices, attorneys general, and rate payers as well. And that is a lot of what my group and external affairs does. We are engaging with our state folks, with our state regulators, and also to the extent that they are interested in what the ISO is doing with actual end users. So we are part of a much larger electric power system. ISO oversees just New England, but the entire orange area on this map is what we call the Eastern Interconnection. So we're connected all the way West to the Rockies, all the way South to Florida, and also up into Canada. A big part of the reason that we have the reliability standards that we have under NERC and MPCC is because in 2003, there was a blackout in Ohio, in the Cleveland area that actually trickled all the way down to New England. We saw blackouts in parts of Connecticut. We saw blackouts in New York, so on the Northeast, on the East Coast. And that really was a wake up call for operators to say, we need more visibility on what's going on outside of our region. So we have those reliability standards and we are in constant communication with our neighbors about what's going So on in their before we get into the really kind of technical meat of this presentation, I just had a couple of organizational updates. The first is that we've had a major leadership change at the ISO just recently. You all might be familiar with Born in Van Wheeley, who was our longtime CEO. He retired at the 2025. And stepping into the CEO role is Bamsi Chittendenavada, who also has been at the ISO for more than two decades, most recently serving as our COO. So he has a lot of experience on that operations side of things. He's very engaged on the needful meetings with all of those stakeholders. So he will move into this different role. He's already starting to do some speaking engagements and get out into The States to connect with governors and other folks who are engaged in energy matters. But I feel that we are in very good hands as a region. Bobsy is wonderful to work with. Anyone I think who has heard me speak knows that he is very, very smart. So I think it will be a good transition. And then I have just one markets update, and then we'll turn to system planning. We are undergoing some major changes to our capacity market currently. So as a little refresher on what the capacity market is, this is the one area where the ISO really purchases energy on behalf of the region, and the capacity market helps ensure that the region has the power it needs by securing obligation from energy resources. So this includes generators, but also resources that can reduce demand. Demand resources can participate in this market as well. And to better ensure reliability and cost efficiency as our resource mix evolves, we're proposing some capacity auction reforms that would transition this market from a three year annual forward looking market. That is how we've previously done this auction to a prompt seasonal market with accreditation reforms. So we would be holding the auction much closer to the capacity commitment period and also once for the summer and once for the winter. The yes.

[Speaker 0]: So this is this is that what we refer to here as the forward capacity market?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: That's right. So this is replacing the forward capacity market.

[Speaker 0]: And and impact on efficiency in Vermont, yeah, which has participated in the forward capacity market for for years, and the revenues from that is is one of the primary revenues for thermal thermal efficiency works as they do. Can you talk about that at all?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Or I I imagine that Efficiency Vermont would continue to participate in the capacity market. They would just be doing so for the summer and or the winter, and the timelines are a little bit different now. So I think that their participation might not necessarily change. Just the they're not now looking three years ahead. They're doing an auction in April or May or the summer period versus the three year look ahead. So we're actually hoping this helps folks that participate in the markets because the the commitment period is so much closer. They have a better sense of what their resources are. We have a better sense of what demand is because we're not looking at our crystal ball and trying to guess for three years. We're just looking a few months ahead.

[Speaker 0]: So I guess the number of the matter is, does it increase more volatility or less volatility to We hope much less volatility. To to the revenues that that might be earning from this.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: There there's a lot less guesswork involved with with the the prompt market. So we're hoping less volatility for everyone. That's a big motivation underpinning a change.

[Speaker 0]: Thanks.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So that actually Cecilia, you had a question?

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. It's along these same lines and looking for what is the problem that I was trying to solve with this move. And then I have another question more about

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: impact on. Yeah. I'm actually I'm going to go to the next slide to answer that question. Why are we doing this? A big reason that we're doing this is forecast for us. The switch to a prompt auction allows us to have much more up to date projections about supply and demand and to have more accurate auction parameters. And it allows resource owners like Efficiency Vermont to make better informed decisions about what their costs for selling their capacity would be. So that's a big a big run is the forecasting piece. This also eliminates a problem that we refer to as phantom entry. So with the three year forward market, often we would get resources that were not really constructed yet that were bidding our capacity into the auction. And that was okay when we were mostly dealing with gas plants that pretty reliably could get constructed in that three year period, but we all know that offshore wind has proven to take a lot longer than three years to construct. So now with the prompt option, people aren't selling capacity that may or may not be available in three years. They're selling capacity that is already operating that we know will be able to provide for that commitment period that they have secured an obligation for. And then also the shorter schedule streamlines admin for us and also participation for those resource owners. So those are the big reasons that we're doing this prompt, the switch from an annual forward to a prompt. And also so this was the first part of the filing that we submitted to FERC in December. The other piece is we have shortened the notification process for deactivate FINS. So for resources that are looking to exit the ISO market or retire, We used to have a four year notification process for that. We've shortened that to one year. We are going to continue performing the reviews that we perform to determine market manipulation and also to make sure that these retirements don't jeopardize transmission security. So we're still going to do that piece. We're just not requiring such a long lead time for the notification.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So the Phantom is that Phantom entrance? Yep. Would that also be I've read a lot about data centers getting in queues, to see where they can move fast enough. So, presumably, that's making the picture a little cloudy about where and how much energy is needed. Yeah. So we'll, I imagine, talk a

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: little bit more about data centers throughout this discussion today. Data centers are not typically entering our queues. So we find out about them from the transmission owners because that is the queue that they're coming into to interconnect. So we're getting that information from other folks in the region, and we are really working to make sure that we are getting that information. We have a good line of sight on what data centers are proposed. We are going to start including data centers, not in this current forecasting schedule that we're in, but for 2027, we're going to have a new it won't be specific to data centers, but it will be a new, like, large load forecasting component of our capacity energy loads and transmission report. So we'll be kicking that cycle off in September, and that will be the first time that we've included that. So that forecast will feed into this auction and all of our other system planning. Okay.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: And so for us, for our region, really are offshore wind?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: It's it's largely generation that we're looking at. So the demand piece is how we determine how much capacity we need, but the phantom entry really refers to generation in this instance. Okay.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Do you have any slides that deal with any projections that you did on the effect on costs related to this decision? Because that would be another

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: No. One thing that I will say generally about the capacity market's effect on costs is that, overall, this is a pretty small chunk of how much the wholesale markets cost the region. The years that we have a lot of retirements are when we see higher capacity costs. Largely, it's the energy market that is driving costs in wholesale electricity. That is tied directly to energy prices. In New England, most specifically the gas prices, we see high energy costs in years that gas prices are high. But in years when we have a lot of retirement, we have to secure more obligation for capacity. That's when the costs go up, and I don't think that that will change with this shift.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: K. I still have questions in my head, which will continue to percolate on the effect of cost. Bram Kleppner.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: How much conversation is there in the region about new nuclear generation?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: We're not aware of a whole lot of it. I will say our operators really like nuclear generation. It's a great base load resource for us. It's a zero emission resource, but it is very difficult to site nuclear. So we're we're not aware of any really serious proposals about any new nuclear within New England, but I know that there are a lot of conversations percolating around the small modular reactors, so things might change as that technology becomes more viable. So this is just a quick timeline. Went past it. About so we're in this first phase, the blue section of this timeline now, and work is already underway on the second phase, which will be moving towards that seasonal auction model rather than just the annual and also updating resource accreditation standards. So more accurately rewarding resources contribution for adequacy in the region. This is particularly important as we have more intermittent resources that maybe we can't call upon in an emergency. We can't necessarily call upon solar or wind if they don't have the sunlight or the wind that they need to be producing at that instant. So resources that do have that kind of black star capacity might be compensated differently than the intermittent resources. So that's something that we are working through now with our stakeholders. And just Sorry.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: Sure. On the subject of intermittency, what are the conversations around storage like? And the newly been created.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yeah. We we don't have a ton of storage in play yet, but we have a lot of it proposed. So it's certainly something that our planners are thinking about and kind of, like, when those resources should be able to draw from the grid, if there are any requirements that we need to put in place on that. So that is something that we're thinking about in our forecasting. We're thinking about as you're studying that those resources for interconnection. It's definitely on our system planners' minds. But right now, I have q I have, like, a q snapshot later that shows that about half of our q is battery energy storage. So we're we're definitely thinking about what that impact will be and what the different charging characteristics are and how that's going to affect our load shape.

[Speaker 0]: On on store sorry. You finished.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: I'm finished. On storage,

[Speaker 0]: I I think all the states in New England except for Vermont have had goals or requirements on levels of storage too that utilities have to get to. Do you have any opinion about those goals, whether they how are they working? Are they driving development? Or they sort of impediment or can you talk about the principles now?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Sure. So we definitely see that state policies do drive what we see in our interconnection request queue. Uh-huh. We went from having a lot of gas in the queue to having no gas, and now it's pretty much all wind and storage and a little bit of solar. So it's all driven by what the states have in their own policies and their own goals. We we don't really have an opinion on environmental goals, and we don't have an environmental mandate. No. But we do take those state policies as planning considerations. So that's something that my group does. We work with assistant planners and say, well, Vermont wants this by 2035, and so we need to plan for that.

[Speaker 0]: Mhmm.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So we do and and we don't just assume that everyone is going to reach their goals because we've learned that that isn't realistic necessarily. Right. So we do also work with the utilities, with the PUCs, with the department to say what is actual adoption for these technologies like. So we do have those conversations as part of our planning every every cycle. Okay.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Thank you.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: I'm not sure you didn't answer this. Battery storage units, what are they made of, and is it a hazardous waste? Is there a way to recycling process for end of life?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Almost everything that we are seeing proposed is lithium ion. So that is what is in our queue currently. I can't really speak to what the disposal process is. That is often kind of upon the municipality where it's cited is what that process looks like and what the requirements are. I know there's a lot of communities that have kind of decommissioning requirements for various projects of solar, like batteries. So I think it is kind of municipality by municipality on that piece of things.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Just a quick question about FERC. So are these filings not likely to result in any changes or demands from from your regulator?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yeah. I optimistically perhaps don't anticipate with the car changes that there would be a lot of pushback from FERC. This has been a lengthy and involved stakeholder process. And typically, when there's a consensus among the stakeholders, FERC doesn't push back too much. I I feel optimistic that we will get an approval on this and hopefully in a timely fashion because as you can see from this timeline, we are hoping to have these changes in place for 2028 for capacity commitment period '19. So this will be our nineteenth capacity auction, and that is going to mean getting this second phase filed and approved in pretty short order as well.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Sorry, Sarah. Can you remind me, Carr? I'm sure I was on the slide before. Capacity auction reforms. Capacity auction reforms. Okay.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Alright.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Alright. Now we are going to get into system planning. So we do have some changes that are new and ongoing to our interconnection process. Just to remind folks about interconnections.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Okay. Do you wanna Sorry. I'm sorry. Before we move on

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: well, I because I think it connects to the path Okay. To the capacity reforms around pricing again. So I really I I wanna understand how the ISO sees, what effect this is likely to have on pricing, on the markets. So it it seems to me that if you were shortening, that it's it seems like it's likely to be more of a more profitable for those who are selling onto the market as opposed to, you know, if you're looking longer contracts. But I don't know. What have you done any work to understand what the

[Unidentified Committee Member]: potential impacts are on the cost?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So let me just clarify. We're not looking at longer contracts. The capacity commitment period is still one year. The the difference is that we were running the auction three years ahead of that capacity commitment period. So the the actual commitment is is not longer. It's still for one year. We're just doing that option closer to that commitment period. So I don't think that the shortening of that three year time span will have a really notable effect on prices. It might, I think, bring them down because folks have a better idea of what their costs are, and they can more accurately submit what they think they can provide that capacity for without having to do a lot of hedging that they might have felt like they needed with a three year look ahead. So we're hoping that this really is allowing our resources to fit in at the price that they need to make themselves whole and really no more. And the way that we run the auction, we are selecting the most affordable resources that can lead our capacity. So we are taking the prices that the resources are submitting. We're saying, okay, here's the lowest price for this many megawatts. Here's the next lowest price for this many megawatts until we get to that number that we need to feel sooner about the capacity for that commitment period. So we we are hopefully choosing the most affordable resources. I'm hoping that the shortening makes it easier for folks to submit accurate costs and that those costs will likely be lower because they have a better idea of what to expect with such a short lead up.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: For tomorrow?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So this the capacity you're talking about is is a fraction of what is being generated and going on. Right? Generated and used. Correct.

[Speaker 0]: I mean, that's a small But It's

[Unidentified Committee Member]: a small amount of the total capacity in going. So

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: the I did not refresh myself on the the metrics that we use to calculate what we need to procure for capacity. That's right. But essentially, what we have these resources for is that in the event that there is a capacity shortfall, there is an energy shortfall, these are the resources that we call upon and say, You have a capacity supply obligation for this much, and we need you to give us that. And if they can't deliver, then resources that over perform, they essentially end up paying the resources that perform. So these are the resources that we're calling on in an emergency situation. So it is just a fraction of of what we need. Most of our resources are participating in in the energy market. They're buying and selling in the energy market day to day. Sure. And then we have these folks who say, okay. When you call me, I can give you this.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Right. I just wanted to clarify that. This was just your pricing around this. It's only only happens in an emergency situation.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Right.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Not like day to day.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: No. And we don't have many of these energy shortfalls. We have a handful every year. Right. And most typically in the winter, occasionally, we see them in the summer. Generally, we see, you know, December, January, February, and then July. Occasionally, there's a handful. Representative Campbell? And

[Speaker 0]: it might be useful if you could explain briefly how an entity like efficiency will not that is is is is selling efficiency into this market. How the how do you call upon that first when when you're when you need it?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yeah. So As opposed to generation.

[Speaker 0]: I mean, it's pretty obvious how you could call upon generation. Is that

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Sure. So we call upon them in the same way that we would call upon generation because we see a reduction in demand exactly the same as generation. From our operator's perspective, it looks the same. So a lot of our demand side resources, like energy efficiency, that's just a twenty four seven reduction that we're seeing in demand for folks who have situations where they like, oh, we don't have a lot of this in New England, but an easy example is industrial loads can kind of say, oh, we're not going to run right now. If the ISO calls and says, we need you to stop what you're doing, then they can shut down. I see. Okay. So that's that's kind of the easy example of how we see a a demand side resource participate in

[Speaker 0]: the market. Precision remote would have agreements with with users Right. To to cut demand as quickly as you we'd have to ramp up Right. Generation on the outside. Okay. Thanks. Do

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: you have any data, Sarah, on trends related to how often these emergencies are happening?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: We have to post about any of these capacity deficiencies when they occur. I can find the link and share that with folks because we produce a memo every time kind of saying these are the actions that we called for. This is what happened. And per the ISO's information policy, there's nothing generator specific. For for instances where, like, a generator tripped, and that's what caused the deficiency. But we do say, you know, we've lost 600 megawatts of generation at this hour, and we called for this action. And we were in the the deficiency for this long. So we we produce those memos for every one of the events that we have. So my my question is more about trends. You have data on the trends on how often that's happening. Is it something that's increasing or decreasing? Yeah. I don't think in so many words we have that, but you could certainly kind of see what we have posted and see if there are patterns. In the four ish years I've been at the ISO, I think we're pretty consistent. I do think as we move more toward the winter peak, we might see these things happening more in the winter versus the summer, which is where our our peak has been. So that might be the seasonality of these types of events might shift, would be my guess, or we might already be shifting in that direction as there's more heating electrification. But off the top of my head, I don't think we have, like, a data source showing that. We just have the memos and the posting of all of the events.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Okay.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So just to touch on FERC Order 2023, this was around interconnection reforms. Before any resource can connect to ISO's grid, we conduct a series of studies to ensure that that resource can receive service reliably. So we're not approving or denying any of these projects. We're just making a judgment about whether it can interconnect reliably where it is proposed, and if not, what transmission upgrades might be required to enable that resource to interconnect. We used to maintain this queue serially, but under FERC order 2023, all of the ISOs and the RTOs in the country were required to make changes to the interconnection process in your hopes to address queue backlogs by prioritizing projects that have the highest likelihood of actually being developed and deterring speculative ventures. Because what would happen is we would often see a developer proposing the same project four or five times in different locations to see where they could get the best lease, where they could get the cheapest interconnection because there weren't a lot of transmission upgrades required. And, obviously, you're not going to build all of those four or five projects. They're going to move forward with the most promising one. But all of those projects are in the queue, and we have to study them all. So that bogs us down. So what 2023 did was it introduced a first ready, first served process versus a first come, first served. And we now study all of the interconnection requests as a group or a cluster. There are also additional financial and site control requirements on developers, and they now face potential penalties for financial penalties for withdrawing projects from the queue.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Sorry. Is the cluster it's not geographic. It's by time. I don't understand. Can you I don't understand the cluster.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yeah. So the cluster, it is the clusters are by time. So we open the cluster study window once a year. Okay. And we study that entire batch of interconnection applications. See them.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. Yes. They might all fit together.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yep. Exactly. So we are in what we're calling our transitional cluster study right now that opened in October per FERC that must be completed by August. And then our first full cluster study under this new process will open this October. So this is just a little infographic showing what the interconnection process would look like. Anyone looking to interconnect must submit a request through our interconnection request mapping tool. This information is publicly available on the ISO website. There's obviously not complete identifying information about all of the projects, but you can get a really good sense of what is proposed and where in the region, what types of resources are being proposed. That's actually what we use to generate the interconnection snapshots that I will show you later in this deck, anyone can look at that on the ISO website. The next step, once that has been submitted under the new process for order 2023, it is only possible to submit interconnection requests during a cluster study window. So as I mentioned, the the next cluster study is expected to be open from October 5 through November 19. So folks will have about six weeks to submit their projects. And then after that window closes and we've completed all the necessary study work, the developers will work with the ISO and their transmission owners to execute an interconnection agreement, which is a formal document detailing the terms and connections around the interconnection service. And then following that, construction can begin, and any generators must just notify the ENSO and register their asset before they can start producing power. That is a really rough process and flow of the interconnections.

[Speaker 0]: The appropriate level for us. Okay. Great. So

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: now I'll talk a little bit more about what is in that transitional cluster study. So these were all the projects that were eligible after the window closed. There are 24 projects in there currently. There are it's mostly battery storage, 19 battery storage projects, two solar, and three wind projects, most of them in Massachusetts with two each in Vermont and Maine and one each in New Hampshire and Connecticut.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Sure. I could okay. No. Never mind. So just to give you a

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: sense of the difference in the order of magnitude here, the April 2025 doughnut chart is preorder 2023. So you can see we had almost 37,000 megawatts. On the right, this was just earlier this month that we pulled this information. So there's just shy of 14,000 megawatts in the queue currently. So that includes the roughly 5,700 that are part of the transitional cluster study and then also about 8,000 megawatts of projects that had already completed studies and were allowed to remain in the queue to work towards their interconnection. So that's why that number is a little bit different than what you saw on that transitional cluster study slide.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So so that difference is almost all just speculation.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah. We're from the

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: system now.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yeah. That's this came up. I was at the Vermont System Planning Committee yesterday, and there was a lot of shock, I think, about the drop off here. What we saw when we had our serial queue was that only about 30% of projects completed construction. So that is actually pretty similar with the drop off that we've seen moving to this project. So I feel confident that that about 14,000 that we have in this queue, those are real projects. Those do have a high likelihood of actually coming online. And the financial penalties for withdrawing significant. So the motivation is really there from those developers. They feel that these are viable projects that are in that queue.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: How come wind didn't drop off

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: more? I think because those projects have either been in development, I think that a lot of those projects you'll notice we only have three in the class. We're studying. So a lot of those are ones that carried over that had completed a lot of their study work already. Okay.

[Speaker 0]: And And this is just a percentage of

[Unidentified Committee Member]: the 14 Denominator went down.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah. Right. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. All on the same face.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Right. Yeah. And Okay. And on the topic of wind, we're aware of some of the federal statements coming out of the Department of the Interior to pause offshore wind leases. This does impact two projects in New England, Revolution Wind and Manger Wind One. In August, we issued a statement related to the Department of the Interior's since overturned order to stop construction on Revolution Wind. And then in December, we issued a similar statement that highlighted increased risks to reliability and adverse impacts to New England's economy. A significant portion of Vineyard is already complete and supplying electricity to the region, and Revolution is also largely complete. We expect that that project will come online this year. Through the region's wholesale markets, both projects have committed to helping meet our demand for electricity. They're included in our near term and future modeling and analyses to ensure adequate electricity and new language. So these projects are important and we have made public statements to that effect. They're particularly important for system reliability in the winter when offshore wind output is highest and other fuel supplies, gas, and New England are constrained. So we've have posted statements to our newswire just saying that we really need these. These are a reliability asset in New England, and we are hopeful that this stock order will be overturned as well.

[Speaker 0]: Has ISO New England taken any legal action or joined any lawsuits to support or to overturn this

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: No. We we don't typically, given our independent nature, weigh in. If if we were asked to come and testify about a reliability concern, that is something that we would do. Mhmm. But we imagine that the developers are are taking those types of steps. Mhmm.

[Speaker 0]: Is there enough sort of, guess, brief or anything like that that you would that I said we'd do?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: We would really just our role as we see it is as a technical expert, so we are happy to weigh in in that vein on on issues like this, and that is what we've done with these statements. Thanks.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So I realize my next Yeah. I think so. Yeah. That reliability is is the key issue here, but these are also gonna drive down prices. Right?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Potentially.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Or not. Mitigate increases in prices more more likely.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: They may. I'm not certain where these projects fit into the capacity market, so I can't really opine on that. But we do tend to see that wind is a less volatile resource than gas, which is really tied to what the weather is doing and what the supply is like. So certainly steadier prices, I would say, with wind versus some other fuel sources that we see.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Sarah, the revolution wind, I think the courts have said, can continue. Yes. Is it

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: the same for vineyard wind? So there's a new there's a new order that came out in December, and I think that that is still pending in the courts. Okay.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: It's a little counterintuitive to me that gas is more weather dependent than wind. Could you explain that to me?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So in New England, we rely on liquefied natural gas. And in the winter, there are a lot of pipeline constraints associated with that. Also, we because of the Jones Act, and this is the part that got a little hairy for me as well, there are only so many ports where we can receive gas and it has to be on a a US flagged ship. So sometimes it is difficult to get the shipments of gas that we need in the winter, and that scarcity drives prices up. So we that's why we see gas prices so so high in the winter, and then it really comes down when the the winter is more mild or in other parts of the year. So we see big spikes in very cold weather, and we also have concerns about getting the gas that we need to New England in the winter. Wind obviously is tied to when the wind is blowing, but we have great wind resources in New England, particularly in the winter when we are worrying about gas. So we see wind as a really great reliability asset for New England winters and balance out the problems that we have with gas.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: Gas prices spike in the winter sounds like both the supply and the demand issue. Supply is more constrained and demand goes up. Yes. Got it. Thank you.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Just Sarah, I'm sorry if you answered this question already. The two Vermont projects that are are what what types of projects are they? You know, I didn't pull this.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: I think that they are both batteries, but I can I can confirm? Okay. Thanks.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: Because they're not wind.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: This screen can make sure.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yes. Okay. So longer term transmission planning is a pretty noteworthy effort that New England is making compared to some other RTOs. We're required to plan for the future of the power system, as I mentioned. We're only required to do a ten year look ahead. Our states came to us and said, we really like to go further than that. We'd like to see where we're going to stack up with our goals about decarbonization, and we need to look further than ten years to get an accurate picture of that. So working with the states, we introduced a longer term transmission planning effort. We did our first study under that effort, the 2050 transmission study in 2024. And the next phase of this longer term transmission planning effort allows us to issue and evaluate requests for proposals at the request of the state for needs identified by the states and to then provide technical assistance to review those submissions and also to help secure federal funding for transmission investments. So we are in our first RFP under that effort. We issued the RFP in March 2025. And let me just refresh my memory about what the ask was. To upgrade the transmission system between Northern Maine, where there's a lot of land based wind generation proposed, and the more populous reason regions in Southern New England where our demand is. Right now, there's a bit of a disconnect between where the resources are and where the load is. So this request for proposals would help address that by strengthening our North South transmission. So we issued that RFP in March. This was a need that all six of the states agreed upon as targeting for the first RFP. Proposals were submitted by September 2025. We received six proposals, and the ISO is currently reviewing those proposals and hopes to make a recommendation for a preferred solution by September.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: That is a large cost range. Is you typically get ranges that big when you put out RFPs?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: We don't typically put out RFPs. So this is this is a little new for us. It is it is a very large cost range, and we are evaluating the proposals according to a cost benefit analysis and also other criteria that were provided to us by the states. So we will certainly be considering costs and weighing that very heavily with the recommendation that we make for our preferred solution.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: That's billion?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: That is billion. Absolutely. And just for folks who are interested, we will be providing updates on this process through our planning advisory committee. That is one of our new pool stakeholder committees that is open to the public. So any updates provided by the ISO

[Speaker 0]: will go through this pattern. And

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: this is different, Sarah, than the interconnection

[Unidentified Committee Member]: RFI?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yes. That is a state's effort. The ISO is not super involved in that. Great.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: So on that cost factor, Vermont's at the what? Can it be 2% of that?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Vermont is typically 4%. So in in New England, costs that are determined to be for transmission that is regionally beneficial, for regional reliability are shared by the states based on their load. So in Vermont, that is typically around 4%. So Vermont would pay 4% of a project that was deemed to have a liability need.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: Just to say an extra $120,000,000 for the higher bid versus the lower one for Vermont. Right.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: That's what I

[Speaker 0]: see.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: And and and we would pay for that. Correct? That's part of that would be part of the

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Right. So it it would so it would go through the transmission orders and trickle down to ratepayers through utility bills.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Mhmm. And what happens if we don't develop that transmission in the region? What is that facilitating? I guess there's a different way of saying that.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So what it would be facilitating is that we could access the land based wind resources in Northern Maine and get them to where the load actually is. Right now, we don't have a great way to do that because of transmission constraints. So we're just losing out on those land based resources of Maine.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: And you said that wind helps us offset winter peak. Yeah. Wind is great for winter reliability. Okay.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Wouldn't that line also connect to Canada, or is that a separate

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: There is currently there's a line that recently came online Northeast. Northeast. Yeah. That's that that one's different. This is not currently proposed to connect to Canada.

[Speaker 0]: Sure.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: What if the capacity generation is in Vermont and used by Vermont doesn't go into the per se regional grid that Vermont pays more of the transmission upgrade that that'll get passed on. Has some projects that don't aren't aren't the cops aren't co chair. Is that correct?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: For Velco's infrastructure, we aren't necessarily if it's not of a regional benefit, then the costs are co shared. So the the developer or the transmission owner pays for those. Actually, that might be a good segue into this next discussion item. What we refer to as, like, asset condition projects. So that's the transmission owner upgrading their facilities. They really manage that process, and the ISO hasn't historically had a lot of oversight. Those costs also are not shared throughout the rate generally. So anything that is just a benefit to Vermont, we wouldn't share those costs. Transmission owners do have to come to the pack to just present their asset condition upgrades. And so the region gets a chance to review them and say, oh, these costs look crazy or, okay. That looks good.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: I just wanna this is my unpleasant job. So you have 41 slides. We're at slide 21. I'm just saying that to the room. It is it is an awesome resource to have you here. We Yes. We do have to be done at 10:30, so I just want all of us as a group no. I'm not I I want all of us as a group to just help me keep an eye on the time because I don't wanna suddenly have to cut you off, you know, slide 30.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Sure. Well, actually, I will say I was kind of planning to stop at about thirty two because the remainder of the deck is resources.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Great. So you can feel better. Okay.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. Ask you

[Speaker 0]: a quick about about No.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: That that's not what I meant. I'm just I don't wanna cut everybody off.

[Speaker 0]: How speculative are the are these I guess that's one the things you'd be analyzing. I'm wondering about whether the resources in Northern Maine exist now or are how how close they are to to being actually there. And and then there also is a question about how difficult it would be to build trans this transmission. But that these are the things that you're analyzing, I'm sure.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yes. So the I I didn't actually check to see what had rolled over into the new queue, but those land based wind projects proposing me have been in our queue for quite some time. Okay. And I do think that they are part of that roughly 14,000 that still remains in the interconnection study queue. So I think those are fairly viable projects. As for the constructing the transmission, that is a a thornier issue. There's a lot of different entities that will be involved in permitting, and there's a lot of different neighbors and embodters who I'm sure will have feelings about it. So that's the piece I that's a lot more

[Speaker 0]: up in the history there. Yes. Okay. Alright. Thanks.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So, okay, back to asset commissions. This is another request that came to us through The States because there has not historically been a lot of oversight on what the transmission orders are doing to upgrade their infrastructure. They've asked the ISO to take on a new advisory role as an asset condition reviewer. This has really never been done before at any ISO or RTO. We have enlisted a consultant to help with interim asset condition reviews as we try to define that framework and move to a more permanent ISO run process. And given the novel nature of this effort, we expect the interim process to take a little bit of time. We're doing stakeholder engagement currently, and our goal for a finalized definition of the role of the ISO really moving into that role is January. So just I wanna make

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: sure I understand this, and we heard about this at NCEO, I think, this summer. We have the occasion when transmission is built, then and I don't know that I understand this, that it's an investment for folks to build transmission as opposed to all that being necessary, and that this advisory role is supposed to help clarify where we are having more of an investment rather than necessary. That is my understanding as well. So

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: utilities can recover their costs for building transmission on utility bills. And without the oversight, it is possible to what we kind of, say, gold plate some of these projects and recover those costs and do, like, a little bit more than what is actually necessary for reliability. So that is the problem that the states, I think, are trying to solve with this request of the ISO. Mhmm. And and I will just say that Bellco is not the TO that we have seen issues with. Right. Has been very supportive of this role. Commissioner Johnson has been very supportive of this role, very outspoken in his role as an escrow manager that he thinks this is a really good thing for the region to pursue. So we are happy to support this for the states. And is it in place now? It the interim the consulting is in place. We're in the interim reviews currently, and I'll I'll just provide some areas where you could track this initiative if you're interested. We provided a list of projects for that interim review project at the Planning Advisory Committee in October. I did check before this presentation and that list is still current, and we'll be discussing an update at next week's Planning Advisory Committee meeting. So that will be the first real discussion on this since that interim list was released in October. And updates will be provided to the PAC on relevant findings. We also, yesterday, at the transmission committee, kicked off discussions about this. So the transmission committee and the planning advisory committee are the two stakeholder that will really be providing updates about this effort.

[Speaker 0]: Alright.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: And now we are going to kind of get into the nitty gritty of inter and intraregional transmission planning. So is there any question about the Nope. Anything? No. Okay. Probably no.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Let's cut them. Okay. You

[Speaker 0]: don't have any questions. It's really funny.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So this map illustrates the back the backbone of our transmission system. We have about 9,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines. It's primarily three forty five kilovolt, so that is what you see on the map in blue, and one fifteen kilovolt, which is red.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: You'll be proud of us.

[Speaker 0]: It's over there.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: At our door. The door.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Oh, wow. I'm so thrilled to be

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: that hot. So

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: we have eight alternating current transmission ties that connect us to New York and one direct current tie to New York across the Long Island Sound. We also are interconnected to our neighbors in Quebec through Vermont and also through Maine with two direct current ties to Quebec. And those are phase two red tie gates. Phase two is often the largest single source contingency in New England with import capacity of about 2,000 megawatts. These ties are really important because we are historically a net importer of electricity. Consistently about 10 to 15% of our energy comes from imports every year. We have been exporting a little bit more recently given what I understand to be drought conditions in Canada. So we've had very small amounts, I think, in November, which was the last full month we had. We exported we had net exports of about 29 gigawatt hours. So not not a lot, but but we have been exporting these last couple of months for anyone who is tracking that closely. And we have invested really significant amounts of money in this infrastructure. 13,000,000,000 since 2002 with another nearly 400,000,000 planned, I think, through 2029 is the time frame that we're looking at at this point. And also private developers continue to build on those projects that would help interconnect clean energy, and we call those electric transmission upgrades. Those are also included in our interconnection request queue. So you might notice if you're looking at not all generation, we include those ETUs in the queue as well. Chris, question. Yep.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: So I recall when we were down at your place in Holyoke, we saw that map. And the Northern Part Of Maine was not connected to ISO New England.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: That's right.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: And is the transmission you are contemplating going to connect that little system up in Northern Maine to ISO New England?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: I don't believe so. We're looking I think it's more in, like, the the western portion of the state that we're looking to connect is where the wind is proposed. I'm not 100% on that, but that Northern Tip Of Maine is not within our region. Don't think that's large. So just to give a really broad overview of transmission planning. As New England's RTO, Regional Transmission Organization, we're responsible for the development of long range plans to address future needs. As I mentioned, it's at least a ten year planning horizon, ten plus now with our longer term transmission planning upgrades. These needs are typically summarized in a regional system plan. We do this at least every two years. And so we just came out with a new one in 2025. RSP 2025 is the result of an open public process that was conducted through public meetings at the planning advisory committee. Stakeholders offered input and feedback. And in response to some of the feedback we've received on recent additions, the RSP is a lot shorter and more accessible, I think, than past editions have been. We also have produced a really handy two page plan summary that I've linked in this deck, and that summary is available in both English and Spanish if any of you have stakeholders who you think would benefit from a Spanish language

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: version. When

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: we think about system planning, there's really two buckets that activities fall into. The first is resource adequacy. So that is really just ensuring the availability of a diverse supply of resources that can provide energy during a broad range of system conditions. This includes our forecasting efforts, monitoring resource mix and fuel security, particularly with more renewables and intermittent generation, analyzing retirements for reliability impacts, as I mentioned before, administering that interconnection queue, and administering the capacity market as well as conducting economic studies. Then transmission planning, we perform our reliability analyses. We develop solutions or issue RFPs as we're doing under the longer term transmission planning upgrade, review transmission costs. Planning for public policy is something that we have a mechanism to do under FERC order thousand, which I will get into a little bit more in slides. That is where the states can say, we have these clean energy goals and we need transmission to address them. Hasn't really been used all that much historically, but that is an option that the states have. Performing those longer term transmission studies and what I'm going to focus on for the next couple of slides is conducting interregional planning activities. Our interconnections with our neighbors allow for the exchange of capacity and energy and facilitate access to a diversity of resources, also help us maintain compliance with our environmental obligations, and allow for more economic interregional operation of the system. We conduct with entities both in and outside of our region studies that aim to address common issues that affect the planning of the overall system and determine whether an interregional solution is more efficient or cost effective than just doing something in New England. We're really well situated for interregional coordination given the diversity of demand in neighboring regions. So we are a summer peaking system. Canada is a winter peaking system. So those different peaks help us help each other when our systems are stressed. But as you may have heard folks from the ISO talk about, we are moving towards a winter peak. Our winter and summer peaks will converge around to the twenty thirty four timeline, and we expect to be winter peaking by about 2035. So as our system becomes dual peaking and to move more towards a winter peak, the diversity of demand will diminish and a really well coordinated interregional system will become even more crucial.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Can you explain to me the most basic question of all time? To what extent so, you know, we have the big regional grids. To what extent or how is it managed? I I don't really understand the extent to which power flows from one big region like ISO to Quebec or to another. I I thought those ties were a lot smaller. And could you just level set for me?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yeah. So our operators are constantly on the phone with the operators in the other regions. And as we're overproducing, we're calling and saying, we're a little over, we're sending more doorway, or if New York is having a problem, they're calling our operators and saying, We need this. Do you have it? And we're making those decisions about what we can send over those timelines. But that is something that we have someone in our control room that is just constantly on the phone with New York. We have someone in our control room that is constantly on the phone with Quebec. We are in constant contact with them. We also for anyone who has come to the ISO and seen the big control board, we have it called out how those systems are operating so we can see their frequencies. We can see where they are with regard to their projected demand in real time so we know if that phone is going to ring, and New York might need help or Canada might need help. So we we constantly are balancing our needs and also keeping an eye on what's happening in our neighboring systems.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: And that's what they're called tie lines? Yes. You said? Yep. And are those something you shut you can shut off and turn on? Sorry. Go back at, like, +1

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: 01 here. That piece, I don't have as great a grasp on to what extent we can completely shut that down. I know that

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: They're not it's not it's not this free flow of power.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: No. It's not Manage. Can't just suck what we have going on in New England.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Does that include JPM? What what that's the one PJM.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: We are not directly interconnected to PJM, but via New York. We're all interconnected. I showed that big orange swath of the map that shows the Eastern interconnection. So they're all we're all roughly interconnected, but to PJM via New York.

[Speaker 0]: Well, this is and I can build on one zero one, maybe one zero one a or one zero two or something out. How does the power if if you if that there's not a switch that you throw that goes from full power to zero, how how how does the interconnection modulate the power flow back and forth?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yeah. So our operators are telling the power where to go. So I'm not an electrical engineer, and that's going to be very obvious if I try to answer

[Speaker 0]: this question. Nobody nobody hears Well Well

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Well, I'm I'm not a system operator. I I just know that when things get out of whack, she spoke about frequency. So if you have too much demand here Yep. And you and and then it starts drawing down the frequency, the system operators will open a switch to maintain our

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: system, and that has happened a couple of times. Right. And that gets back to what I had mentioned, that blackout that we saw cascading all the way down to Cleveland, that is because it's not because they were drawing power from New England. It's because their issues trickled down to cause frequency problems that impacted our region. So that is really what we're tracking and deciding, okay, it it makes sense for us to send more power to avoid a potential blackout situation here if we see the frequency really dropping or going too high in one of our neighboring regions. And our operators are calling. They're they're also on the phone constantly with our transmission owners who actually operate the the transmission and saying, alright. It's time. We're going to it's time for you to send some more this way.

[Speaker 0]: K. It's fine. I don't understand. That's fine. Okay.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So the

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Well, that's a coming weather event.

[Speaker 0]: Yes.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: What, yeah, what's gonna happen? The New York says we've gotta have a lot more than than we need to hear.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So what we think we will need to export is part of our daily forecasting. So we if we are expecting that New York is going to need more from us than usual, that's part of what we are procuring in our day ahead energy market. So we are we are thinking about that. We're looking at forecasts in New England, but also in our neighbors. We're talking at our neighbor. Right. And they also are telling us, we we think we might need some help. So that is something that we are planning for in the day ahead. And then, of course, we're making adjustments in real time as needed.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Hope you charge them extra.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Well, they they they pay. Yeah. They they pay for any power that they're getting from us the same way any any other loan would.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Really quick question. This sounds so complicated. Are you using AI?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: No. Okay. We are exploring ways that we could use AI. We are always trying to improve and be agile To date, we have not found that AI can do it better than a human brain. The decisions that it makes are not satisfactory to our operators. So we are sticking with have six or seven folks in that control room at all times. They work twelve hour shifts. They're very good at their jobs, and I don't expect them to be replaced by AI anytime soon.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Or assisted, I guess.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So this, I think, gets I hope to R. Sibilia, I know you had some questions about New York and some of these other entities. This shows kind of the different reliability standards that guide our regional planning and which entity is responsible for each of them. So ISO maintains reliability standards for New England and our transmission facilities. We are New England's reliability coordinator, but we work within the oversight that provided by NERC and NPCC. NERC is designated by FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, as this North American reliability organization. They issue long term reliability assessments that analyze conditions across North America. And that report discusses transmission additions, generation projections, and reserve capability by reliability council area. So New England is one of those council areas. And then NPCC is one of six regional entities located throughout North America. They're responsible for enhancing reliable and efficient operations of the bulk power system. NERC has authorized NPCC, so it goes for NERC NPCC as far as operations are concerned, to create regional standards that enhance reliability for the international and interconnected bulk transmission system in the Northeast Part of North America. Fully participate in NPCC coordinated interregional studies with our neighboring areas. All of these studies are really well coordinated across the neighboring area boundaries and include the development of common databases that serve as a basis for studies by the ISO and by New York and other ISOs that are part of that. The objective of those assessments are to demonstrate full compliance with NERC and NPCC on our part and also to meet requirements for meeting resource adequacy and transmission planning standards. And then just another thing that NPCC does that we pay close attention to is they issue several special reports. The one that we watch most closely is the Northeast Gas and Electric System Study. So that's about coordination between gas and electric systems, and that gives us some really good insight as to what we should expect constraints on the gas system. If if a lot of the gas is being used for home heating, what does that mean for electric generation? So that's a report that we follow really closely every year. So just to touch on what the current planning coordination protocol is, ISO, New York ISO, and PJM all follow a planning protocol that I have linked here if anyone is very interested. Some light reading. That enhances coordination of planning activities and addresses interregional issues. These three RTOs are also part of the Joint ISO Planning Committee, or we refer to this as GIMC or JITC, that introduces inter or addresses interregional transmission planning issues. The interregional planning stakeholder advisory committee, or IPSAC, is the stakeholder body for that joint ISO planning committee. Materials are posted publicly for that stakeholder body. We post them publicly to our website as well. Meetings are open and they meet twice a year, currently in May and December. And with input from IPSAC, the JIPC develops the Northeastern Coordinated System Plan every two years. So we're working with New York and with PJM on that Coordinated System Plan, and we're regularly in touch with our neighbors in New York and their neighbors in the PJM region.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. So way back at the beginning with the map, how many RTOs were in that Eastern system? Oh. Is

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: it more than just those three? Yes. So all the way down so the That's fine. The southern powerful SPP is in there as well, I think, parts of MISO, the main continent ISO are touched in, like, the the Midwest. I don't remember if I don't think ERCOT is a part of that at all. But I think at least those other two are involved as well as I'm not sure what the Canadian organization is, but there would be a couple in Canada as well.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Okay. And how long has this coordinated planning been going on between these three ISOs?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: I don't know that off the top of my head. Decades, years. I think at least a decade, I would say. I can look into that, though.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: That'd be great to understand. That'd be good perspective, Sarah.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: I'm just Yeah.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: In terms of where we are in space time here with

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yeah. Absolutely. It's it's been going on for quite some time. I I would say decades. Mhmm. We I mean, the ISO has only existed technically since 1997, and I think that this this partnership probably came pretty shortly after. Okay. Okay. So this is just a little bit more of a granular look at what the different responsibilities for the JIPC versus IPSAC are. Really the main difference is that IPSAC allows for stakeholder input and coordination. It's a little more public and they provide input to the JIPC on their planning activities, which are primarily under Section six and seven of that planning protocol that I had mentioned earlier, which is interregional assessment and system expansion planning studies and also evaluating potential interregional transmission projects under FERC Order 1,000, which I have a little bit more and I thought it was this slide. It's the next slide. This is just the timeline for identification and evaluation of these types of projects. It starts with review of needs and solutions identified by the JIPC with input from stakeholders from IPSAC. Then the three RTOs exchange relevant data and information, And based on that information, an interregional project is identified. And then that final step is cost allocation.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: And an interregional project, sorry, madam chair, is a is a connection. Right?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yep. So inter is across regional lines. So inter would be between New York and New England or between New England and Canada. Intra and whipping. Right. But project means an interconnection. Yes. Yep. Okay. That's right. So cost allocation for interregional projects is determined according to joint operating agreements between each pair of protocol parties. So between New York and New England, for example. And it's consistent with the cost allocation principles under FERC Order 1,000, which FERC Order 1,000 is the public policy transmission order that I mentioned way back. This established guidelines for both intra and interregional transmission planning and added a process where developers could submit projects rather than the ISO leading development for transmission solutions. Under order 1,000, we select the most cost effective submittal that meets the identified federal, state, or local public policy rules. So this is really specifically tied to public policy. And the incumbent transmission owners provide back stop transmission solutions, but they aren't necessarily just automatically selected to provide the solution. So there are cost allocation principles in that order, and any cost allocation between two protocol parties must follow those principles.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Did you have a question? And then I might have a question, maybe.

[Speaker 0]: Yes. So this looks like your last slide.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: This is my last really substantive slide. Okay.

[Speaker 0]: So I I I think one of the things that we're concerned about is here is to what extent data centers in particular, but, like, the electrification in in general will, in other regions, and PJM area and Quebec, put pressure on prices, retail prices in in Vermont or in in in particular. Does that something we should be worried about?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: So my statement on data sectors and large loads generally is that we aren't really seeing in New England.

[Speaker 0]: But

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: not seeing them in New England. Right.

[Speaker 0]: Right. But we're interconnected with We are. With the neighboring regions.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: I would not expect what's happening in PJM to necessarily have huge cost implications for New England. It is something that we are certainly keeping our eyes on in hopes of learning from our neighbors what's happening in other regions. Should these types of loads come to New England, we we want to learn from other people's mistakes. We what we are currently doing, I mentioned that we are starting to forecast for large loads, so we will start that effort later this year. We also have set up kind of more lines of sight with our transmission owners just so we make sure that we're aware if someone comes to Velco and says, I'd like to interconnect this large load, that they are immediately picking up their phone and telling us we we might have something in Vermont. So that's what we're doing. We just keep an eye on everything and have a really good idea of what we think is coming so that we can have accurate forecasts for these types of loads, and so we're not really blindsided. The cost of electricity being what they are in New England, we're not a very attractive market for data centers at present, to be very candid. So I I wouldn't expect to see the types of data center loads that we're seeing in other parts of the country.

[Speaker 0]: Would would Hydro Quebec power be attracted to the data center? Are we likely to see competition for for HQ power?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Again, to be candid, we're we're not even seeing Hydro Quebec export to the region at this point, so I don't know that they have a lot of power to be giving to data centers either. Okay.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: To what extent do the RTOs try to meet all of their demand within their territory?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yeah. We we do like to meet our demand within New England to the extent that we can. As I mentioned, we've historically been a net importer, so we haven't quite done that. We don't have all of the resources that some of our neighbors have. The having access to Hydro Quebec has been a great source of imports in the years that we have been able to import from them. And that is largely who we are importing from when when we do have the imports. They are more affordable than some of the resources that we have in New England, and that is often why we are importing because it is a more affordable resource that we are giving an obligation to in our in our markets. If that's not true, then we do what we can in New England, but often the the hydropower that we can get from Canada is cheaper than what we can do domestically.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: And, I mean, generally, we just let the market create generation. Right? Like, we don't have any way to compel someone to build a generating plant. We just hope that they see the demand, and they see they can make money so they add more generations.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: That is the intent of the markets.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. And so you're talking about imports from h two on

[Speaker 0]: the spot market is what you're talking.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Right? Yep. In the day ahead or in the day ahead.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Like the

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: short term. Yeah.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: That actually answers the question I have.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Because there's long term.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Because I yeah. I thought we had a a steady and locked in power supply from HQ that was but you're talking about excess capacity in the forward market. When you talk about

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: the as with HQ is separate from what the ISO is doing. Oh, okay. Utilities.

[Speaker 0]: Alright. Yeah. Can you remind us about your cybersecurity protocols? If the if

[Unidentified Committee Member]: you are seeing any changes in that situation in the last year or two?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Yeah. We have very intense cybersecurity protocols with the IOs. I'm sure you can imagine. We are constantly employees are constantly going to trainings and making sure that we are not introducing anything into ISO systems that could be dangerous. Our control room is very locked down. I don't even have access to the control room. It's a very small group people that can even get into that space or any of the systems involved in the operation. And we are trying to remain agile, they mentioned around the AI. We're aware of what's out there. We're trying to see what we could do that would improve our processes without introducing risk. So there's constantly cost benefit analysis going on that could we do this more efficiently? Could we do this more affordably with technology? And what is the potential security concern associated

[Speaker 0]: with that?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Have you seen an uptick in attacks, potential attacks?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: We I'm insulated from that kind of thing, but I have heard from our cyber folks that it it's constant. And I think that that's true for a lot of folks that are in this line of work. I think our our other RTO counterparts are seeing that as well, but we're staying very vigilant. And we haven't really had, thankfully, knock on wood, any any sort of but people are certainly trying.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: And we heard testimony yesterday that Vermont systems deflect 1,500,000,000 cyber attacks a year. I believe it. And you have a much bigger system.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So with the interregional collaboration, we heard from our partner of public service that we would be able to because peaks would be happening at different times in different places, that that would be a cost savings. Yes. That's true. It's great when the peaks balance each other out because then we can help our neighbors or we can send things over this transmission line at this point because they're peaking at

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: a different time. So it is good when there's a diversity of peaks. Unfortunately, I do think in the Northeast, we are all moving close winter. So I do think programs like managed charging for electric vehicles on the utility level will be really important to managing our our peaks in New England.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: She was first. Yeah. Can you explain your ISO's understanding of what the state's intent is with that RFI for more interconnection with PJM? I wouldn't want to speak for the states. I think that

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: I'm trying to think of what the was it the department that was involved in that for Vermont? I I I would encourage you to ask the department that question.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Mhmm. But the ISO does not have an understanding of what they're trying to accomplish? Mhmm.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: I'm sure that folks at the ISO do, but we really try to make it happen. I'm not speaking real estate when when they have their own initiatives that are going on.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: And just a quick one to point out, we did hear from the utilities that they're expecting Vermont to become summer peaking. Interesting. Going to winter peak

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Okay.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: Because because we ten years ago, had no air conditioning here, and and now people are adding heat pumps to their air conditioning. So there's summer load thing on that didn't exist before, whereas other parts knew it had air conditioning all along.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: Well, Vermont is just always from the rest of the world.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Basically, they try to stay start making snow in July.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Alright. That was very helpful. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: If Yeah. Do we have any time at all after

[Speaker 0]: Two minutes.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: I'll just highlight one quick thing then. So the consumer liaison group is the one way that we really interface directly with rate payors. At the ISO, we don't generally do that because we don't deal with retail electricity. But we host four quarterly meetings at the CLG every year, and we will be in Vermont for our first one. The final location is still being determined, but it's looking like it will be in the Barrie area. So I just wanted to give you all a save the date for that, Wednesday, March 25. And these are offered in hybrid format, all of them, so you can attend on Webex if you're not equal to in person. Perfect. How long are those meetings? They're typically about three hours. So if they're generally we we feed you. We give you lunch, and it's from, like, noon to 03:30 or the meeting from 12:30 to 03:30 with lunch beforehand. We might shift a little later and make it a little shorter. So time may also slightly too easy on that.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Quick question. Who is Vermont's?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: The Vermont representatives are Julie and Drew Hudson, who both identify as as rate payers. They don't I don't think they're participating with their organization. Great. Thank you so

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: much for being here. Really appreciate it.

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: You so much for having me, and I've given you all my cards. If you have questions about the gray and the background, I'm happy to come in via Zoom or answer those questions. Absolutely. You. We can go out live, Alex,

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: and we'll be back in five. Did we eat them?

[Sarah Adams (Senior State Policy Advisor, ISO New England)]: No. Thanks. We'll do more.