The IESO is responsible for the planning and operation of the IESO-controlled grid and of the IESO-administered markets. As part of its mandate, the IESO performs: planning of future upgrades and expansions to the Ontario power system, assessment of new or modified connections, maintenance and derivation of power system limits, performance validation and modelling of new or modified equipment and facilities, planning of outages to transmission system equipment and real-time operations of the IESO-controlled grid and IESO-administered markets.
The IESO’s Market Forecast & Integration (“MFI”) team is charged with creating and issuing a daily operating plan for the IESO’s control room for real time operations. The operating plan, as defined by the NERC standards listed in table 1, includes day ahead optimization and the outage planning process. While a material aspect of this plan is day ahead scheduling and optimization, the majority of the staff on the MFI team are focused on the outage planning process for the province’s electricity grid. This work involves the review and assessment of equipment outage requests from market participants
to facilitate planned removal of equipment from service without creating reliability concerns for the IESO controlled grid. The operating plan also includes re-preparation instructions for control room staff (as required by NERC standards and NPCC criteria) following the occurrence of unplanned contingency events.
The Service Provider will be required to conduct a detailed review to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing tools and engineering processes used in the outage planning process completed by the MFI team and recommend process improvements to realize efficiencies with the work performed.
