How to Prepare for a Capacity Auction: Calendar, Accreditation Deadlines and Bid Strategy for PJM, MISO, NYISO and ISO-NE

Noreva, an energy market data and analytics provider (formerly Karbone Research), tracks capacity auction results across every major US ISO and RTO. A capacity auction – PJM’s Base Residual Auction, MISO’s Planning Resource Auction, NYISO’s ICAP market, or ISO-NE’s Forward Capacity Auction – sets the price resources are paid to be available when the grid needs them, months or years before delivery begins. The PJM capacity auction runs on an accreditation, demand-curve and offer-cap calendar that starts roughly six months out. MISO, NYISO and ISO-NE each run a version of that calendar on a different clock, and missing a deadline in any of them means missing the auction.

This guide is built for a trading desk or a project developer sitting roughly six months out from a bid decision. It lays out the four auction designs side by side, the auction dates that can be confirmed today from official ISO sources and the ones that are not yet published, a phase-by-phase preparation checklist, what changed in the 2025-2026 clearing results and why it matters for the next auction, and how a forward capacity curve turns a calendar deadline into a bid.

What Are the Four Capacity Auction Designs You Need to Know?

PJM, MISO, NYISO and ISO-NE all procure capacity in advance of a delivery period, but the forward horizon, the geography and the price mechanism differ enough that a strategy built for one market rarely transfers cleanly to another.

Capacity Auction Designs: PJM, MISO, NYISO and ISO-NE

Noreva’s capacity hub covers all four of these designs plus SPP and CAISO, with ISO-specific pages for PJM, MISO, NYISO and ISO-NE.

When Is the Next Capacity Auction in Each ISO? What Is Confirmed and What Isn’t

The table below lists the dates that can be confirmed today, September 2026, from official ISO sources. Where an ISO has not published a specific date, the table says so rather than estimating one from past cadence: a wrong deadline is worse than an acknowledged gap.

Capacity Auction Dates: Confirmed and Outstanding, September 2026

How Do You Prepare for the MISO PRA and the Other Three Auctions? A Phase-by-Phase Checklist

The specifics differ by ISO, but the sequence of what has to happen before you can submit a credible offer is consistent across PJM, MISO, NYISO and ISO-NE.

T-6 months: accreditation and status

• Accreditation and ELCC class. Variable resources are accredited on Effective Load Carrying Capability (ELCC) rather than nameplate capacity in PJM and MISO, and the assigned class drives expected capacity revenue per MW – see Noreva’s UCAP, ELCC and firm capacity by ISO.
• Must-offer status. Confirm whether the resource is subject to a must-offer requirement, and whether any deactivation, retirement or must-offer exception request needs to be filed before the accreditation window closes.
• Interconnection and commercial operation status. A resource whose interconnection agreement status has changed, or that has not reached commercial operation, needs that status reconciled with the ISO’s generator database well before qualification deadlines – a common cause of late disqualification.

T-3 months: the parameters the ISO publishes

• Demand curve parameters. PJM publishes its Variable Resource Requirement (VRR) curve – net and gross Cost of New Entry (CONE) – ahead of each BRA. NYISO publishes ICAP demand curves by locality ahead of each capability year. MISO publishes its Planning Reserve Margin Requirement and zonal Local Clearing Requirements ahead of the PRA.
• Reliability requirement. The Installed Reserve Margin (PJM, NYISO) or Planning Reserve Margin (MISO) sets how much capacity the system needs relative to forecast peak demand – it is the reference point against which every offered MW is measured.
• Reading the published parameters against the prior year. A tighter reliability requirement, a higher CONE estimate, or a revised ELCC class typically signals upward pressure on clearing prices before the auction window opens.

T-1 month: offer construction

• Offer cap. PJM’s Market Seller Offer Cap (MSOC) references an Avoidable Cost Rate (ACR) calculation that PJM publishes by resource category – the screen that determines whether a unit can offer at its own cost basis or is held to a default value. PJM’s Minimum Offer Price Rule (MOPR) can also apply, but only in two situations: where the resource receives or may receive Conditioned State Support, or where the offer would constitute an exercise of buyer-side market power. A unit-specific exception process is available in both (PJM Manual 18, Section 5.4.8).
• Cost-based offers. MISO and ISO-NE both allow or require cost-based offers for certain resource categories rather than a market-based offer cap; confirming which regime applies to a given unit changes how the offer is built.
• Accredited MW. The value a resource can actually offer – accredited UCAP in PJM, Seasonal Accredited Capacity in MISO – after ELCC or seasonal de-rating should be reconciled against internal generation planning figures well before the offer is finalized.

Project finance teams underwriting new capacity should treat this checklist as a financing-model input as much as a bidding one – see Noreva’s coverage of project finance and PJM auction repercussions.

What Changed in the 2025-2026 Capacity Auction Clears – and Why It Matters for the Next One?

PJM: two straight years at the price cap, both short of the reliability requirement. PJM’s 2027/2028 BRA, results announced Dec. 17, 2025, cleared at the FERC-approved price cap of $333.44/MW-day and fell 6,623 MW short of the reliability requirement (PJM Inside Lines, Dec. 17, 2025). The 2028/2029 BRA, results announced Jul. 14, 2026, cleared at $325/MW-day RTO-wide UCAP – a 2.5% lower cap than the prior year, since PJM recalculates the collar for each delivery year – procuring 138,318 MW of UCAP plus 10,864 MW from Fixed Resource Requirement entities, and fell 6,831 MW short of the reliability requirement. PJM’s own results release describes these two auctions together as “the first in PJM history in which the entire RTO fell short of the reliability requirement” (PJM Inside Lines, Jul. 14, 2026). Noreva’s own coverage has argued that PJM’s price collar is now the binding constraint on the signal the market sends: modeled capacity revenue north of $500/MW-day against a cap holding clearing prices below $350/MW-day left roughly 800 MW of capacity on the sidelines, an information gap Noreva has called “all ask visibility and no bid visibility” – see PJM auction price opacity worsens, determining demand in the PJM auction edition and why PJM isn’t ready to let capacity prices run. The demand growth behind this is not new: PJM’s forecasted peak load for the 2026/2027 Delivery Year alone rose year over year by more than 5,400 MW, and that year’s BRA cleared just 139 MW above the reliability requirement (PJM Inside Lines, Jul. 22, 2025) – a far thinner margin than the shortfalls that followed.

MISO: seasonal prices eased, but the margin stayed thin. The 2026/2027 PRA, results published Apr. 28, 2026 by MISO, cleared summer capacity at $424.30/MW-day in the North/Central zones (LRZs 1-7), $384.10/MW-day in LRZs 8 and 10, and $412.10/MW-day in LRZ 9 – well below the prior summer’s $666.50/MW-day, a fall of about 36% (MISO, 2025 Planning Resource Auction results, reposted May 29, 2025). Fall cleared at $33.92/MW-day, winter at $35.97/MW-day and spring at $7.61/MW-day, for a North/Central annualized price of $126.19/MW-day. MISO attributed the relief to capacity offered growing “by as much as 4% in each season” (MISO, 2026 PRA results, Apr. 28, 2026). For 2027/2028, the read is that MISO’s seasonal construct is separating summer risk from the rest of the year as designed, but a single large supply delay could reverse the 2026 price relief.

NYISO: a tighter NYC requirement is the story going into winter. NYISO resets locality capacity requirements ahead of each capability year, and the New York City requirement is the variable that most often moves that zone, because a single large import can change what the locality has to procure. Going into the winter 2026-2027 strip auction, the open question is whether that tightening persists or eases – see NYISO’s ICAP Automated Market System for auction-by-auction results.

ISO-NE: the reform is the story, not a single clearing price. FCA 18, the last auction under ISO-NE’s legacy three-year-forward design, cleared for the 2027/2028 Capacity Commitment Period at a preliminary $3.58 per kW-month in all zones and import interfaces, securing 31,556 MW. The year before, clearing prices had ranged from $2.55 to $2.59 per kW-month across pricing locations, so FCA 18 repriced New England capacity by roughly 40% in a single auction (ISO New England, February 9, 2024). The more consequential development is regulatory: FERC approved the Capacity Auction Reforms – Prompt/Deactivation (CAR-PD) component on Mar. 30, 2026 (Docket No. ER26-925-000), and ISO-NE expects to file the Seasonal/Accreditation (CAR-SA) component in Q4 2026, both ahead of a Capacity Commitment Period starting June 1, 2028 that will be procured on a prompt, closer-to-delivery basis with separate summer and winter products (ISO-NE, Capacity Auction Reforms Key Project page, 2026). For any resource planning to participate in FCA 19, this preparation calendar effectively resets once CAR-SA is filed, since the accreditation methodology itself is changing.

How Does a Forward Capacity Curve Change the Offer Decision?

A capacity auction offer reflects a view on where the clearing price lands this cycle and where it is likely to sit across the following two to three years, since a unit’s revenue over its planning horizon depends on more than one auction outcome. Whether to offer, at what level relative to the ISO’s cap or cost-based floor, and whether to lock part of the position bilaterally are all decisions that follow from that forward curve view.

This is the layer Noreva adds to the calendar and checklist above. Noreva publishes near-term capacity auction forecasts (roughly 1 to 5 years) and 25-year merchant capacity curves by ISO and zone – PJM LDAs, MISO’s Local Resource Zones, NYISO’s NYC, LHV and ROS localities, and ISO-NE’s system and import-constrained areas – with Low, Base and High scenarios and ELCC-adjusted capacity credit by technology, delivered via API, CSV or the Noreva Data Hub. The methodology links transaction-level pricing insight, fundamentals modeling and policy signals such as the PJM price collar or ISO-NE’s CAR reforms into the same curve used to decide how to bid. See Noreva’s forecasting services for the full methodology.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the next PJM capacity auction?

The next scheduled PJM Base Residual Auction is for the 2029/2030 Delivery Year. PJM has scheduled it for December, as it works toward returning to its three-year-forward planning cycle (PJM, July 14, 2026). The exact offer window and results date are not yet published. The most recently completed auction, for 2028/2029, cleared at the $325/MW-day price cap on Jul. 14, 2026 (PJM Inside Lines, Jul. 14, 2026).

How do I prepare for the MISO PRA?

Start at T-6 months by confirming ELCC accreditation class and must-offer status, then track MISO’s published Planning Reserve Margin Requirement and zonal Local Clearing Requirements at T-3 months, and finalize the offer – cost-based or market-based, depending on resource category – once MISO’s parameters and offer cap guidance are set at T-1 month. See the phase-by-phase checklist above and Noreva’s MISO capacity page for zone-level detail.

What is a capacity auction?

A capacity auction is a forward market mechanism, run by an ISO or RTO, in which generation, demand response and storage resources compete to be paid for committing to be available during a future delivery period, and the ISO sets a single (or locational) clearing price based on the intersection of the offers submitted and the ISO’s reliability requirement. For the full mechanics by market, see Noreva’s capacity hub.

What is the difference between PJM’s Base Residual Auction and MISO’s Planning Resource Auction?

PJM’s BRA is historically procured roughly three years ahead of the delivery year (currently on a compressed catch-up schedule) and clears a single RTO-wide price plus separate prices for constrained Locational Deliverability Areas, bounded by a FERC-approved price cap and floor. MISO’s PRA is an annual auction held roughly two months before the delivery year starts, clearing separate prices for each of 10 Local Resource Zones and, since Planning Year 2023/24, for each of four seasons within that zone.

Why has ISO-NE delayed FCA 19?

ISO-NE, with FERC’s approval, has pushed FCA 19 back multiple times to allow time to design and implement the Capacity Auction Reforms – a shift from the legacy three-year-forward, annual, descending-clock auction to a prompt auction with separate summer and winter products and a new capacity accreditation methodology. FERC approved the first (Prompt/Deactivation) component on Mar. 30, 2026, ahead of a Capacity Commitment Period beginning June 1, 2028, and plans to run the first auction under the new framework in 2028 (ISO New England, Capacity Auction Reforms key project page, accessed September 27, 2026).

Get the Forward Curve Behind the Next Capacity Auction

Noreva’s capacity forecasts cover PJM, MISO, NYISO, ISO-NE, SPP and CAISO with near-term auction forecasts, 25-year merchant curves and ELCC-adjusted capacity credit by zone – built to inform the bid decision, not just describe the last one.

Book a demo to see Noreva’s capacity auction forecasts and forward curves for your ISO and zone.