The Texas Public Utility Commission last week dismissed a complaint asking that ERCOT be required to reprice a 2019 dispatch interval after a pricing error sent wholesale prices to their $9,000/MWh cap (49673).
Houston-based energy trader Aspire Commodities last year asked the commission to make generators repay the ERCOT market an estimated $18 million for what it called a “fictitious spike price” in May 2019. Calpine later admitted it had mistakenly notified ERCOT that it had taken about 4 GW of generation capacity offline when, in actuality, it was still operating. (See ERCOT Asks PUC to Dismiss Trader’s Complaint.)
In agreeing with an administrative law judge’s proposal for decision, the commission said ERCOT’s protocols don’t mandate a price correction when an interval’s pricing is affected by a market participant’s “erroneous telemetry.” At the same time, they suggested the grid operator work on a change request to make sure it better defines the process in the future.
“We shouldn’t wait for there to be a really huge event to be having this discussion and this fight,” PUC Chair DeAnn Walker said during the commission’s open meeting Thursday. “ERCOT does have to rely on the input given by the market participants. There’s no way to do it other than that, so when the market participant provides something that is wrong, ERCOT’s left in a position not knowing what to input to get whatever is right.”
“In this case, ERCOT applied the protocols correctly,” said Commissioner Shelly Botkin, who joined the commission after serving as the grid operator’s director of corporate communications and government relations. “I would like a conversation with ERCOT to see if there’s a different way to do these things.”
ERCOT staff last year said they would seek to strengthen telemetry data and work with stakeholders to evaluate alternatives.
In other action, the PUC approved adjusted energy efficiency cost recovery factors (EECRF) for Oncor (50886) and Texas-New Mexico Power (50894). The commission set Oncor’s 2021 EECRF at $64.8 million and TNMP’s at $5.9 million. Both companies reached unanimous settlements with all parties involved.
