By Tom Kleckner
ERCOT staff have laid out a plan to work with stakeholders in addressing a May pricing event that has led to a complaint filed with Texas regulators against the grid operator.
Kenan Ögelman, ERCOT’s vice president of commercial operations, met with the Wholesale Market Subcommittee on Wednesday and proposed three issues for further discussion with market participants, including potential changes to the grid operator’s price-correction methodology; adding filters, requirements or different standards to the external telemetry coming into ERCOT; and improving the communications structure around price corrections.
Ögelman said staff would return to the WMS in September with an issues list. He said he expects “more topics than any solutions.”
“We’d like to give a high-level presentation and see if you have any other issues,” Ögelman said. “I think it’s important everyone see all the issues and where they’re going so we can get a solution.”
On May 30, prices briefly reached the $9,000/MWh maximum when the security-constrained economic dispatch system received bad telemetry data from Calpine. Staff quickly corrected the data, but they have refused to correct the prices because the data were external.
“Incorrect telemetry coming from outside ERCOT is not something we run corrections for,” Ögelman told the grid operator’s Board of Directors in June.
Aspire Commodities, an energy broker, has filed a complaint with the Public Utility Commission of Texas asking that generators refund the market $18 million (49673). (See ERCOT Asks PUC to Dismiss Trader’s Complaint.)
Morgan Stanley’s Clayton Greer, who has complimented ERCOT on its quick response to the pricing error, urged quick decisions in the future.
“You let us know you were not going to reprice that day. The market understands once you do that, it’s final,” he said. “If you could find a way to put into words what you did [on May 30] into the protocols, that would be optimal.”
“We want prices to reflect the fundamentals of the market,” Reliant Energy Retail Services’ Bill Barnes said.
Luminant Generation’s Ian Haley indicated his company preferred to see bad telemetry rejected.
“We don’t think ERCOT should be in the business of determining what is and what isn’t correct,” he said.
