The Wacky World of ISOs

Navigating the various independent system operator (ISO) portals to submit your financial trades can feel like stepping into a Dr. Seuss book. Yes Energy’s® Submission Services™ is here to help.

The various ISO submission portals can be extremely difficult to navigate. It’s amazing how different each of them are from each other. You’d think they would have designed some of them similarly. Here’s a quick tour of each of the ISO trade submission portals and some of their unique aspects. 

CAISO

CAISO refers to Virtual Trades as Convergence Bids. Their submission portal is called Software Infrastructure Business Rules (SIBR), pictured below. The Bid Curve (or Price Curve) must start with a quantity of 0 and the last two price values must be the same value. SIBR has a ‘cancel trades’ button, but you can only cancel the highlighted trades on the sheet, so it can take a while to withdraw a large portfolio. 

MISO

MISO’s portal to submit virtual trades is called Day-Ahead and Real-Time Market User Interface (DART MUI). Their Bid Curve looks a little more like you’d expect and you can add up to 9 bid segments per hour. To cancel the trades you delete the bid segments. 

In order for your Pnode’s to show up in the dropdown you need to add the locations to your portfolio in MISO’s Manage Portfolios tool. It’s common for traders to miss this step and wonder why they can’t view their trades.

SPP

SPP also calls their Submission portal the Market User Interface, but that’s where the similarities end. You navigate to your nodes by filtering through the letters the node’s begin with. The bid curve needs to be monotonically decreasing on buys (bids) and monotonically increasing on sells (offers). The volumes are cumulative and monotonically increasing. To cancel trades you can use the “Delete” button.

PJM

PJM’s Market Portal is called Markets Gateway. They refer to their Virtual Offers and Bids as Incremental Offers (INCs) and Decremental Bids (DECs). You can have up to 20 bid segments per hour. To delete a trade you right-click and select “Delete Trade”. Their Spread product is called Up-To-Congestion transactions (or UTCs).

Similar to MISO, you add locations to a portfolio for the trades to show up in PJM’s Markets Gateway.

NYISO

NYISO refers to their virtual product as Virtual Load and Supply Bids and is accessed via their Marketplace application. They only allow their 11 zones for trading. You can submit up to 3 bid segments per hour. To delete submitted trades you delete everything using the “Delete All” button at the bottom of the screen.

ISO-NE

ISO-NE’s Submission Portal is called eMarket. Similar to PJM, they call their virtual product Inc/Dec Bids. You can have up to 50 (!) bid segments per hour. To delete trades you delete out the MW and Price values and hit Update.

ERCOT

ERCOT has a Virtual Product called DAM Energy-Only Offer and DAM Energy Bid. Their Spread product is called Point-to-Point Obligations (PtP). These can be accessed in their Market Manager application. After hitting “Create New” a pop-up will appear where you select the Settlement Point (Load Zone, Hub, or Resource Node) and you enter your offer or bid details. On the left side of the pop-up you indicate if you want it to be a Multi-Hour Block bid, which means you’ll either get awarded on all the hours on the bid or offer, or none of the hours.

Yes Energy’s Submission Services

Yes Energy built Submission Services for traders. No matter which ISO you are submitting to, the submission process looks the same. There’s no need to interact within the various ISO portals or remember the various nuances of each ISO.  We normalize the entire process in the back end and have advanced functionality to help you get your trades submitted.

To learn more about Yes Energy’s Submission Services, schedule a demo!