The California Resource Adequacy Program: Achieving Reliability and Economic Efficiency through Virtual Re-bundling of Generation and Distribution

The primary purpose of the short term RAR is to address local resource adequacy requirements by ensuring that sufficient local generation capacity is contracted and available to the CAISO to meet CAISO´s local reliability need in load pockets and to reduce the dependency on RMR contracts. The devastating consequences of the California energy crisis highlighted several fundamental flaws in the California electricity market design and some of the policies adopted by the CPUC in deregulating the California electricity market. The Resource Adequacy (RA) program accomplishes these goals by mandating long term contracting and procurement of generation capacity by the CPUC jurisdictional load serving entities.