To truly understand the e-Tag history and the evolution of physical energy transactions, you need to travel back to the early 90s when Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) created the Energy Policy Act of 1992. The NERC e-Tag story involves the evolution of energy software as well as deregulated energy markets.
1992 Energy Policy Act
The Energy Policy Act established goals and standards and altered utility rules to boost clean energy and enhance overall energy efficiency in the United States.
The Act attempted to enhance competition in the electric power industry by lifting legal barriers in generation markets. The EPA also provided tax incentives and other subsidies to environmentally clean and cost-efficient generation technologies.
The Energy Policy Act of 1992 was the first significant step toward electric deregulation in North America, followed by FERC Orders 888 and 889 in 1996, which laid the groundwork for formalized deregulation of the industry and led to the creation of the Open Access Same-Time Information System (OASIS) network.
FERC Orders 888 & 889
On April 24, 1996, FERC enacted Orders 888 and 889 to safeguard and promote generation competition and ensure that external users of the transmission system were treated fairly.
Order 888 = Open Access
The primary goal of Order 888 was to develop and promote competition in the generation market by ensuring that transmission customers were treated fairly. FERC suggested six steps to achieve this goal:
- Require all jurisdictional utilities (within the United States) to file an open-access transmission tariff (OATT)
- Require investor-owned utilities (IOUs) to unbundle wholesale generation and power marketing from transmission services functionally
- Create Independent System Operators (ISO) and operating guidelines
- Encourage reciprocity for non-jurisdictional (i.e., municipalities and cooperatives) utilities
- Allow utilities to recover stranded costs
- Identify ancillary services and comparable services to operate the bulk power system properly
Order 889 = Standard of Conduct
Order 889 provided considerable detail about how all electrical market participants should interact with transmission providers. For example, it defined the structure and purpose of OASIS “nodes,” which are secure, web-based interfaces to each transmission system’s market offerings and transmission availability notifications.
Each OASIS node became a single point of market information distribution and a customer gateway for transmission service requests (TSR), even for connected power marketers who wanted access to their parent company’s transmission.
Thanks to the introduction of OASIS nodes, energy could now be scheduled across several power systems. As a result, physical trading volume exploded and resulted in instances where transmission system operators could not determine all transactions affecting their local system or take any corrective efforts to avoid situations that could cause the power grid to be damaged or collapse.
As a result of this new challenge created by deregulation, e-Tag’s history began soon after the NERC Tag was developed.
The NERC Tag
By establishing the NERC Tagging application, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) stepped in to handle this new problem that jeopardized the North American power grid.
NERC Tags recorded the entire transaction from start to finish. This process allowed them to connect all the transmission legs collected from different OASIS nodes and establish how the overall schedule affected transmission systems and what transmission priorities were employed in the schedule. It also allowed them to decide which schedules should be shortened to reduce the transmission system burden.
Introduced in 1997, the first NERC tag was based on an Excel spreadsheet. Power marketers and schedulers completed the form.
After creating a NERC Tag in the spreadsheet, the data was distilled into a compact CSV formatted data packet emailed to all the participants indicated on the NERC tag.
NERC quickly decided that it did not want to be involved in any further software development or maintenance after introducing the NERC Tag spreadsheet and packet emailer.
e-Tagging History
E-tag’s history started in 1999 due to the cumbersome manual process of creating and emailing NERC tags.
Data transfer now occurred over an internet connection and made real-time use much more manageable. As a result, physical trading volumes began to soar.
With the introduction of real-time tagging, NERC began gathering real-time and near-future data on energy transactions scheduled across the North American power grid. The information from approved transactions was transferred to the Interchange Distribution Calculator (IDC), which created a virtual study model of the Eastern Interconnection.
Although NERC developed the initial e-Tag, they gladly opened the market to energy software developers. As a result, there were a lot of e-Tagging software companies at first.
The e-Tag was created so that different programs might have different graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Still, they had to interact with each other effectively “under the hood” when transmitting, receiving, and processing e-Tags.
Within the first several years, the number of e-Tag software options shrank to only a few prominent vendors. This decline was because complying with the NERC e-Tag Specifications became prohibitively expensive for any software business that did not already have a considerable market share or appropriate financial support.
By 2007, only one e-Tagging solution provider remained, but since then, PCI has entered the e-Tagging space.
e-Tag+
PCI’s e-Tagging solution, e-Tag+, sends, receives, configures, and validates NERC e-Tag. At the same time, e-Tag+ records transactions, establish eTag security and provides open integration with other PCI software modules and third-party applications. In addition, automated and manual two-way communications between Tag Authorities and system users occur via secure communication channels.
e-Tag+ manages all stages of the Tag lifecycle and enables users to quickly and intuitively enter, validate, approve, submit, correct, withdraw and terminate e-Tags. Included is the ability to link multiple tags (from multiple owners) to a single deal. Additionally, it fully integrates with our ETRM platform to provide deal-to-tag and tag-to-deal workflows.
Reach out to us to learn more about this functionally rich and secure e-Tag solution, and join us on the journey as e-Tag’s history progresses into the 21st century.
