In a November 2016 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR), the Commission noted that market rules designed for traditional generation resources can create barriers to entry for emerging technologies such as electric storage resources. The new final rule helps remove these barriers by requiring each regional grid operator to revise its tariff to establish a “participation model” for electric storage resources consisting of “market rules that properly recognize the physical and operational characteristics of electric storage resources.”
The participation model must ensure that a resource using the model is eligible to provide all capacity, energy and ancillary services that it is technically capable of providing, can be dispatched, and can set the wholesale market clearing price as both a seller and buyer consistent with existing market rules, says FERC. The model also must account for the physical and operational characteristics of electric storage resources through bidding parameters or other means, and it must set a minimum size requirement that does not exceed 100 kW. The final rule also requires that the sale of electric energy from the wholesale electricity market to an electric storage resource that the resource then resells back to those markets must be at the wholesale locational marginal price.
The final rule takes effect 90 days after publication in the Federal Register. Compliance filings by the RTOs and ISOs are due 270 days after the effective date, with an additional 365 days to implement the tariff revisions.
