Dive Brief:

• California's voluntary Western Energy Imbalance Market (EIM) generated almost $19 million in gross benefits in the first three months of the year, bringing total benefits to $64.6 million since the real-time market was expanded to balancing areas outside the California ISO in 2014, RTO Insider reports. 
• CAISO noted in its first quarter report that one of the significant contributions to the market benefits are transfers across the balancing areas, "which provide lower supply cost, even while factoring in the cost of compliance with greenhouse gas emissions cost when it is transferring into the ISO.
• CAISO also said that unlike past quarters, it exported "a significant amount of energy" to NV Energy and PacifiCorp, and that much of it was renewable generation. 

Dive Insight:

The Western EIM is working to boost renewable generation and lower costs, which could lead to calls for expanding the voluntary balancing market. 

"If not for energy transfers facilitated by the EIM, some renewable generation located within the ISO would have been curtailed via either economic or exceptional dispatch," CAISO said in its report. The total first quarter avoided renewable curtailment was 112,948 MWh.

CAISO said the increases in financial benefits were in part a result of NV Energy's participation when the Nevada utility joined last December, RTO Insider reports. 

"The environmental benefits of avoided renewable curtailment are significant," CAISO said, estimating that avoided curtailments displaced 48,342 metric tons of CO2 in the first quarter. "Avoided renewable curtailments may also have reduced the volume of renewable credits that would have been retracted," CAISO said, but the report does not quantify the additional value in dollars associated with that benefit.

PacifiCorp was the largest beneficiary of the market, to the tune of almost $11 million. CAISO received $6.35 million in benefits, and NV Energy received $1.7 million.

One of the biggest benefits has come from more efficient dispatch, both inter- and intra-regional, in the 15-minute market and real-time dispatch, "by automating dispatch every fifteen minutes and every five minutes within and across the EIM footprint," CAISO said.

Lower flexibility reserves needed in all balancing authority areas is also saving costs by "aggregating the load, wind, and solar variability and forecast errors of the combined EIM footprint."