ISO New England opposes BP Energy Retail Co.’s effort to recoup nearly $6 million in excess funds it paid due to faulty meter data from a third-party provider, the grid operator said in a Friday filing at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
While ISO-NE is “sympathetic” to the issues the retail power provider is facing with NSTAR Electric, which provides BP’s metering services, the filing said, its invoices are final and FERC should reject the refund request.
Eversource, the parent company to utility NSTAR, has not disputed the errors. It supports BP’s request for a waiver from ISO-NE’s rules and contends it should extend to other competitive power suppliers affected by NSTAR’s mistakes.
The problems began in 2024, when NSTAR adopted a new retail billing software system that led to inaccuracies in the load settlement data. In New England, transmission and distribution utilities like NSTAR provide meter services and report load data to ISO-NE, including for competitive retail suppliers. ISO-NE uses that data to invoice the competitive energy suppliers.
As a result, ISO-NE billed BP for “phantom load” it never served.
Some of the errors were caught and ISO-NE addressed them through its Request for Billing Adjustment process, BP said in its mid-October complaint.
However, another set of meter data mistakes was discovered for the southeast Massachusetts zone totaling 144,000 MWh — resulting in a $5.9 million bill for the three-month period starting in July 2024.
The renewable portfolio standard obligations related to that amount could add an additional $3.6 million, bringing the total financial impact on BP Energy of the uncorrected errors to about $9.5 million, it said.
ISO-NE said the deadline for correcting those billing mistakes has passed, however, and BP and NSTAR need to work out the issue on their own.
“This finality is inextricably linked to the finality of ISO-NE’s market settlement framework, including software and processes, which is not designed to ‘resuscitate’ past months for which final bills have been issued,” the grid operator said.
Resettling the bills would hurt other market participants and require the grid operator to resettle its energy, capacity and ancillary services markets for each of the ISO-NE’s roughly 600 market participants for every five-minute interval of July, August and September 2024, according to ISO-NE.
Eversource said the software incorrectly overstated some suppliers’ loads and understated others, and that “this error flowed through to ISO-NE’s invoicing.”
“While other competitive suppliers have not brought a complaint, load settlement is a zero-sum process in which errors affecting one supplier affect other suppliers,” Eversource said, adding that it is eager to resolve the issue.
It noted that FERC previously allowed the New York ISO and the California ISO to correct billing errors.
The Retail Energy Supply Association filed its own comments urging FERC to approve a resettlement for all affected power suppliers.
“Market certainty, transparency and stability allows retail suppliers to offer products and services that they know they can deliver during the term of the applicable contract,” the trade group said in a Friday filing at FERC. “The importance of having confidence in the competitive wholesale market cannot be overstated.”
The dispute in New England comes as FERC is being asked to settle a separate, mid-November complaint brought by Pelican Power challenging the Midcontinent ISO’s plan for a $280 million “settlement adjustment” of its Planning Resource Auction for the 2025/26 planning year.
The MISO dispute is driven by a software coding error that affected its “loss of load expectation” calculations the grid operator used to set its planning reserve margins in its capacity auction.
