ERCOT staff have begun issuing price corrections and resettling 25 operating days affected by two market errors earlier this year.
The Board of Directors approved the price corrections earlier this month, as the errors were not caught in time by staff to resettle the operating days on their own. Staff are working with stakeholders to better define “significance,” the only threshold required to take pricing errors to the board. (See “Board Approves 2 Sets of Price Corrections,” ERCOT Board of Directors Briefs: Oct. 13, 2020.)
Staff began issuing market notices with the final resettlements last week, two days at a time. The grid operator released tables with the resettled amounts for the June 8-9, June 10-11, June 12 and 15 and June 16-17 day-ahead operating days.
In an email to RTO Insider, Dave Maggio, ERCOT’s director of market design and analytics, said the resettlement tables are intended to provide a “market-wide net change in dollars broken out by different components of settlement.”
As an example, he said, the June 10 price correction addresses the effect on market participants that had day-ahead energy sales for that day. A net amount of approximately $5,000 will be redistributed to those participants.
“It’s worth noting that the same market participant is likely to be involved in multiple components of settlement,” Maggio said. “For example, an individual market participant may be receiving additional dollars for day-ahead energy sales and may owe additional dollars for day-ahead real-time obligations that were purchased.
“When it comes down to it, the resettlement is really just a shuffling of dollars around between market participants,” Maggio said.
RTC Group’s Protocol Work Completed
Staff said a stakeholder group working on revision requests needed to implement real-time co-optimization (RTC) has completed its review process by reaching consensus on all proposed protocol changes.
The revision requests will be finalized and posted with urgent status before going before several stakeholder groups, culminating in the Technical Advisory Committee and Board of Directors meetings in November and December, respectively. The TAC and the board will be asked to endorse and approve 11 change requests.
The Real-Time Co-optimization Task Force has met 33 times since April 2019, first developing key principles and then protocols. The Texas Public Utility Commission in 2019 directed ERCOT to add RTC, a market tool that procures energy and ancillary services every five minutes to find the most cost-effective solution for both requirements. The grid operator plans to go live with the tool in 2024. (See ERCOT Stakeholders Dig into Real-Time Co-optimization.)
ERCOT OKs Petra Nova’s Mothballing
ERCOT said on Oct. 20 that a reliability analysis has determined NRG Energy’s Petra Nova Power Unit 1 is not needed to support the transmission system and can be mothballed as requested.
NRG last month sent the grid operator a notification of suspension of operations (NSO) that indicated it intended to place the resource in seasonal mothballs, effective Dec. 20. The unit will be available to the market June 1 to Sept. 30. (See NRG to Mothball Petra Nova CCS Plant.)
Petra Nova has a summer capacity of 71 MW. It was retrofitted at a cost of $1 billion to capture carbon from one of NRG’s nearby W.A. Parish Generating Station coal-fired units. Industry analysts don’t expect the plant to return to operation until oil prices stay consistently above $50 or $60/barrel.
ERCOT’s protocols require it to perform the reliability analysis before approving an NSO.
