Access data and information related to Financial Transmission Rights (FTRs) offered by ISO New England. See Applications and Status Changes if you’d like to do business in New England’s energy markets or need to make changes to your ISO account.
See ISO Express for a large selection of real-time and historical ISO data and reports that can help market participants make informed decisions, such as FTR Auction Results and Congestion Revenue Summaries.
The documents accessible below include:
FTRs are a financial instrument that allows market participants to acquire an annual or monthly share of excess “congestion revenues” collected by the ISO. This revenue comes from congestion costs—the price difference between the least-expensive electricity available and a more expensive option that has to be used instead due to system constraints. Congestion costs can lead the ISO to collect more revenue from demand in congested areas than it will pay to generators supplying electricity to those areas.
Market participants may buy FTRs for different reasons:
Each FTR is defined in megawatts flowing in a specific direction between two specific pricing locations on the power system—from the source point (the point of entry into the transmission system) to the sink point (the point of exit from the transmission system).
The ISO conducts annual and monthly auctions to allow eligible bidders to acquire annual or monthly FTRs, and to allow FTR holders to sell FTRs. Offers and bids are submitted through the ISO’s online application called eFTR. (Request eFTR access.)
The price of each FTR equals the difference between the prices at the sink location and the source location in the FTR auction. This can be a negative value (counterflow FTRs) or a positive value (prevailing-flow FTRs). The total volume of FTRs transacted in each auction is a function of the offers and bids submitted subject to the transmission limits modeled.
As outlined in the ISO Tariff, the revenue collected by the ISO during FTR auctions is allocated back to two categories of market participants:
The administrative costs of holding FTR auctions and settling the FTRs, and the potential cost of participants defaulting on their FTR portfolios, are passed on to market participants with transactions in the FTR market through ISO Tariff charges.
Other sections of the ISO website may also be helpful. Of note:
