Market Intel
NYISO
NYISO
Market Overview
NYISO manages a wholesale power market, serving close to 20M people in the state of New York. The ISO is charged with balancing the available supply of power, every six seconds, from hundreds of power plants over thousands of miles of transmission lines.
NYISO was the first ISO to allow full participation of Energy Storage Resources (ESRs), and currently has ambitious decarbonization targets – and incentives in place to help meet them.

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100%
Renewable energy by 2040 -
~0.2GW
BESS capacity online as of late 2024 -
6GW
Energy storage target by 2030
NYISO has both compelling incentive programs and ambitious renewable energy targets. As the grid transitions to more renewable generation sources – storage will be critical to maintain reliability, and benefit from the increased volatility that can come with intermittent generation assets (ie. solar and wind).
Market Structure
NYISO manages the wholesale electricity market – coordinating energy, capacity, and ancillary services across multiple stakeholders to deliver energy to New Yorkers across regions.
Key Players
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Maintains reliability and manages the market to balance energy demand with supply.
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Intermediary between electricity generators and NYISO; submits bids on behalf of generators and handle financial settlements.
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Own and operate power generation and storage assets bid/sell to the grid.
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Load Serving Entities purchase power from wholesale market to serve end customers.
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Your market navigator; a platform leveraging real-time data and predictive insights to help maximize revenue, ensure optimal performance and grid stability.
Market products
ESRs can participate in energy, capacity and ancillary service markets. NYISO simultaneously optimizes across all markets to find the most efficient way to maintain reliability.
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Energy Products
Bidding into energy products can see high returns from energy arbitrage, and provides flexibility to lock in returns, or capture sudden price spikes.
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Ancillary Service (AS)
This almost acts as offering insurance to the grid. You will get a payment for holding capacity, or offering to scale down generation, in moments where there is a mismatch between supply and demand. Bidding into AS can yield consistent returns, and can deliver outsized revenue during scarcity events.
Installed Capacity Market (ICAP)
NYISO runs seasonal capacity auctions twice per year to secure the necessary resources to reliably meet expected maximum energy needs plus an Installed Reserve Margin (IRM). There is also a monthly spot auction to help fill any gaps that emerge from unexpected demand or outages.
In 2025, NYISO is reassessing shortage pricing mechanisms, keeping the shifting energy mix and need for reliability top of mind. This could result in a redesign of Ancillary Service pricing, possibly creating more achievable value for storage assets able to optimize against new structure.
Storage Opportunities
Historically, market revenues have not been high enough to justify storage investments. However, compelling incentive programs that mitigate risk and offer higher revenue opportunities are making storage a compelling proposition. Energy storage assets will only be able to see strong ROI if they are able to maximize both incentive program revenue, and wholesale market revenues.
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Energy demand in NYISO is projected to rise 50-90% over the next 20 years, driven by electrification of heating and transportation.
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Over 800MW of peaker capacity was recently retired and the majority of assets coming online are wind and solar generation, and therefore have intermittency concerns. This will lead to an inevitable increase in volatility, and create a reliability gap that storage is well poised to fill.
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Capacity prices increased ~400% for the 2023/2024 capability year in NYC.
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NY is offering compelling incentive programs (ISC, VDER), plus the 30% federal Investment Tax Credit help ensure storage assets generate compelling profits.
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Storage assets near bottleneck areas like NYC and Long Island are positioned for high revenue opportunities due to their ability to alleviate grid congestion.
Incentive Programs
New York has numerous programs in place that help storage owners de-risk energy storage projects by supplementing revenue streams.
However, these programs also come with complex and nuanced restrictions, making both the modeling and operating difficult without the right tools.
- Index Storage Credit (ISC): Price support incentive to mitigate merchant risk for utility-scale storage assets1 by providing a partial hedge
- Value of Distributed Energy Resources (VDER): Bill credits for Distributed Generation assets <5MWac
Other retail-oriented programs such as Retail Storage Incentives or storage adders within NY-Sun

Case Studies
Explore NYISO case studies
Maximizing both the incentives and the wholesale opportunity
To make the investment lucrative – energy companies will need a combination of smart development / design – and a flexible operations platform able to optimize across all available revenue streams.
Deep Dive
Developing a winning VDER bid
In five simple steps, you can model a variety of potential standalone and co-located projects in New York and get a realistic depiction of revenue potential.