Portland General Electric joins California power trading market
Expansion of CAISO may be on hold, but its EIM keeps growing, adding its fifth utility member outside of California this week.
On Sunday, PGE began operations in the EIM, which allows utilities to source least-cost generation from around the market through real-time trading every five minutes.
Involvement will help EIM participants “maximize the use of renewable resources, by making it easier to take immediate advantage of available wind and solar generation anywhere in the system while efficiently integrating their variable output with other, dispatchable resources,” the utility said in a release.
The EIM is helping California utilities as well by offering a larger market for daytime solar power, which can push CAISO prices into negative territory during periods of high generation and low power demand.
