Product Update – ISO L&R

Posted on by William Griswold

Greetings,

As much as most of us despise the ISO’s interface to data there are some interesting items if you dig deep enough. One report we especially like is what we are calling the ISO L&R (Load and Resources). We’ve melded several  different reports to create a snapshot view of the hourly ISO dispatch.

As with all of our reports, we begin with a summary:

To access the L&R data select  Fundamentals / Generation / ISO L&R

This view summarizes, by day, the loads, resources, and prices by Item:

All the generation items are sourced from the “ISO Watch” report; Price is the DA LMP; gas is based on Socal Citygate daily spot; heat rate is derived; and demand is from the ISO actual loads.

The reports can be viewed hourly (last 14 days), daily (400 days), and weekly (weekly min,max, avg since Jan 1, 2013).

Hourly Reports

All items are plotted simultaneously on a multi-line focus chart. Kind of messy, but viewing one or two items together is easy, just click the legends to disable:

This is the lSO actual hydro generation, hourly, for the last two weeks and is used in backcasting the Ansergy ISO hydro. You can also combine two items in a single plot:

We’ve selected Solar and Wind. Using the zoom feature we can drill into any period:

In this example, we plotted hourly wind against hydro for the last 36 hours. Like all our reports, they can be saved as bookmarks and combined into dashboards:

This dashboard includes Demand, Imports, Renewables, Nuke, Hydro, and Thermal. For the record, this is the only source we’ve found that reveals hourly nuclear generation – note the cuts over the last few days.

Daily Charts

We have full period of record for all these items (Jan 1, 2012 through yesterday). Our daily  view is organized by Hour Type (HL or LL) and item all which can be viewed as Average, Max, or Min.

The above plots daily HL hydro energy (actual for all ISO hydro projects).  Peak energy occurred on May 23, reaching a maximum  of 5,876 MW of energy for that day. The averages tell a slightly different story:

Peak average hydro occurred on May 30, a week after the hourly peak, and contrast 2017 with 2016 – over 600 aMW more on peak energy this than last year. Speaks to the flexibility of the Cal ISO hydro system to ramp to serve peak load (2016) and also highlights the large volume of water passing the turbines all hours. This is confirmed by looking at the off peak:

Once again, peak shifted to May 27 for the Light Load hours. Also note the contrast between the 2016 peak (3200) and this year which further underscores the significant increase in daily volumes passing through the ISO’s turbines.

Weekly

All of the above analysis can be performed on multi-years by using the weekly aggregation. Here is an example:

Here we plotted Solar and Wind for the last four years. The chart gets more interesting if you layer in Hydro:

Both Hydro and Solar are contributing a total of 2500 aMW (HL) over last year – and you wonder why heat rates have been so weak?

Feel free to contact Garrett ([email protected]) or Bill ([email protected]) if you have any questions or you’d like them to make some custom dashboards. This ISO data looks real good in a dashboard when combined with our real-time reports .

Cheers