Product Update – ISO Units

Posted on by William Griswold

Greetings,

Sounds blase, “ISO Units,” right? It’s not; there is a host of useful information to be gleaned from Ansergy’s most recent addition to its collection of data and forecast tools for WECC power. This new set of reports will replace the “ISO Outage” collection, though we’ll leave the older one on the site for a few weeks until you can swap out your dashboards.

The new version also reports on outages plus a lot more. We use the data in our forecast to turn off units plus to project planned and forced outage rates on much of the WECC. The ISO’s outage data is the single best source in the market, even better than commercial vendors offerings.

Location of Report – Fundamentals / Generation / ISO Generation

Summary by Hub

As with all our reports, we lead with a summary:

In this view, I filtered on HUB = ISO and sorted on CUR (most recent outages as reported by the ISO). What makes the report unique is our complete mapping of all reported units, nearly 80,000 MWs all mapped to Owner, Hub, Demand Zone, Balancing Authority, Fuel Type, and ISO Classification. All of those fields can be used for filtering.

The summary offers three value types:

  • MW Offline
  • Capacity
  • Outage Rates

and four locations:

  • ISO – the total of ZP, SP, and NP
  • SP15
  • NP15
  • ZP26

At a glance, you can see how current outages compare to yesterday (D1), a week ago (W1), or any of the last five years (Y1-Y5).

Unit Level Detail

We provide a more in-depth dive, down to a unit level, on over 600 ISO plants. There is a wealth of information in this report, find it by clicking the URL at the top:; the following is a screenshot of the entire report:

Too hard to read, so we’ll break it into two views. The left-side fields include all the value metrics that change each day; the right-side are fields used for filtering. Ideally, you’d probably just download the report to Excel and do your work from the comfort of your desktop.

The above is the left-side and contains the following fields:

  • ResID – the ISO’s ID for that unit
  • Plant – The ISO’s name for that unit (first 30 characters)
  • Forced – the last Forced Outage Date
  • Planned – the last Planned Outage Date
  • Capacity – the ISO’s rated capacity (MW)
  • CurOut – the MWs currently offline from the most recent ISO update
  • W1% – the average % offline over the last seven days
  • M1% – the average % offline over the last month
  • 5 YR % – the average % offline over the last five years

This view was sorted by capacity, the fields to the right allow additional sorting and filtering options:

These attribute fields include:

  • Online – The date the plant was first energized (per the ISO)
  • Hub – NP, SP, or ZP
  • DemZone – the ISO’s mapping to its Demand Zones
  • Bal Auth – the Balancing Authority in which the unit schedules
  • Owner – the plant owner per the ISO; we have cleaned up this list a bit by using common names wherever possible
  • QF? – Is it a Qualifying Facility?
  • AGG? – Has the ISO aggregated multiple units?
  • ISO Class – the ISO’s internal classification of generation type
  • FuelGroup – Ansergy’s internal fuel mapping
  • RunDate – the date the report was generated.

Here is an example of filtering:

The report is filtered on Calpine and Dynegy, NP15, and Natural Gas-fired generation; then sorted on CUROUT.

Daily Charting

A picture says a lot of words, let’s look at a couple:

Each chart has there value plots:

  • Plants – the # of plants reported by the ISO by date. Very useful for tracing new generation.
  • MW – the total capacity of that group
  • OMW – Outage MWs

All charts have two Options:

  • Location (ISO, NP, SP, or ZP)
  • FuelType

The above chart is daily capacity for the last 400 days; you can also view the same thing for the last five years (weekly averages):

Weekly Charts

This chart plots new gas-fired power plants for the entire ISO. Note the dearth of new generation since 2013. Contrast gas with solar:

The tool is easy to use, click any of the links provided to jump start your exploring or contact Garrett or Bill for a demo.

Cheers,