By Tom Kleckner

ERCOT on Wednesday asked Texas regulators to dismiss a complaint by energy broker Aspire Commodities seeking to make generators repay the market an estimated $18 million as a result of a May pricing error.

The grid operator said the state’s Public Utility Commission should dismiss Aspire’s complaint because the broker failed to complete its alternative dispute resolution (ADR) procedure and also suffered no direct injury from the error.

ERCOT also asked the commission to deny Aspire’s request for a price correction for the May 30 event because its protocols don’t allow for price corrections “when a market solution is attributable to an external data error caused by an ERCOT market participant.”

“Requiring ERCOT to conduct price corrections in cases of external data errors would be imprudent, as this practice would lead to frequent price corrections and result in increased price uncertainty and market instability,” the grid operator said.

ERCOT noted that state agency rules require that a complaint made against it include a statement as to whether “the complainant has used the applicable ERCOT procedures for challenging or modifying the … conduct or decision.”

“Aspire fails to identify any provision … to excuse its failure to use the ADR process,” the grid operator said.

During a June meeting of the ERCOT Board of Directors, Vice President of Commercial Operations Kenan Ögelman said the event briefly resulted in $9,000/MWh prices when the security-constrained economic dispatch system received bad telemetry data. (See “Telemetry Data Blamed for Market Event,” ERCOT Board of Directors Briefs: June 11, 2019.)

He said the data indicated about 5,000 MW of resources wanted to move down during an interval. When the market didn’t respond quickly enough, the SCED engine used regulation-up to get the ramp it thought it needed. When energy prices hit their $9,000/MWh maximum, ERCOT operators reran SCED and corrected the data, but not before settlement prices reached as high as $1,500/MWh in some load zones for one 15-minute interval.

Ögelman said during the board meeting that staff would look into strengthening telemetry data and work with stakeholders to evaluate alternatives.

ERCOT declined to comment on staff’s work, saying it would not comment beyond its filing.

In its complaint to the PUC, Aspire said it estimates ERCOT’s “fictitious price spike” cost the market almost $18.4 million. Aspire said it wasn’t a direct counterparty to the market, but it had exposure through its forward positions in the Intercontinental Exchange (49673).

“We simply cannot understand how anybody associated with the market cannot argue that repricing is absolutely required for this interval,” Aspire President Adam Sinn said.

“Incorrect telemetry coming from outside ERCOT is not something we run corrections for,” Ögelman told the board in June.

Calpine admitted last week one of its IT employees had caused the error, and the company said it has asked ERCOT to reprice the 15-minute interval.