Texas congestion caused by outages and Minnesota’s under-scheduling of wind resources were the lone causes for concern in an otherwise stable quarter bolstered by mild temperatures, MISO’s Independent Market Monitor reported at last week’s Markets Committee of the Board of Directors.

Monitor David Patton said that at the beginning of November, gas prices were under $2/MMBtu and remained consistently low due to reported high levels of natural gas storage. Inexpensive gas contributed to lower overall instances of congestion.

“I believe that’s the lowest average monthly price we’ve seen,” Patton said.

Real-time energy prices were down 26% from 2015 at $25.08/MWh.

However, the Texas Hub faced price spikes in October and November caused by a combination of forced and planned generation and transmission outages. Hourly prices hit $350/MWh on Nov. 3 and 5, rising to about $500/MWh on Nov. 6, causing MISO to declare a local transmission emergency and recall a planned transmission outage.

MISO said October’s outages were examined and ultimately found legitimate but that it is continuing to examine the November outages.

“Because most of these price spikes are being driven by generation outages, we’re going to audit some of these outages,” Patton said.

Meanwhile, Minnesota Hub prices were driven down with high wind production, but a failure to predict all of the wind output created congestion. Patton reported that during high wind output, “congestion was frequently severe enough to generate negative real-time prices at the Minnesota Hub.” Wind day-ahead scheduling in the Minnesota market was approximately 11% lower than real-time wind output.

Patton said wind under-scheduling remains a “persistent phenomenon.”

Shawn McFarlane, ‎executive director of strategy and enterprise risk management, said MISO’s November load averaged 67.8 GW, down 7.7 GW from last November’s colder-than-usual temperatures.

— Amanda Durish Cook