CAISO turned on the West’s first day-ahead market in May with the language markets always get: transparency, price discovery, efficiency finally coming to a grid that badly needs it. Three months later, the state’s own utilities commission is asking the operator to explain itself. Staff filed comments this week saying they can’t reconstruct why CAISO adjusted load by 592.50 MW on June 11, or account for a 3,590 MW adjustment on August 4 — numbers big enough to move prices, small enough in a grid this size to slip past without anyone noticing, except someone noticed.

That specificity is the tell. Nobody distrusts a number down to the decimal point unless they’ve actually tried to reconcile it and failed. And it’s not just the CPUC being pedantic — six California cities running their own utilities, Anaheim and Pasadena and Riverside among them, filed separately asking for an ongoing cost-benefit review, describing “extremely high resource commitments” against “negligible benefits” so far. That’s a striking thing to say about a market you already joined.

What a market is supposed to do, at bottom, is turn a mess of physical constraints into a number everyone trusts enough to act on. If the operator can’t show its work to the one regulator with subpoena power, the “market” part is still aspirational — a very expensive spreadsheet with good PR, two months old and already asking for the benefit of the doubt.

Over in New England, ISO-NE is proposing to review its own long-standing “asset condition” transmission category — the one utilities build with limited oversight, the one states have complained about for years. Different coast, same instinct: audit the thing after everyone’s already paying for it.

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