Author: STEVE REEDY

The Gist Prior to NPRR1124 the maximum amount that resources receiving Reliabiity Unit Commitment (RUC) instructions were allowed to recover for start up and minimum energy was capped by the fuel index price (FIP) times a multiplier.  This NPRR would allow the operator of a RUC’d resource with gas costs over the FIP/multiplier determined cap…

The Gist NPRR1096 limits the amount of ECRS and NonSpin that a battery is allowed to provide.  The original NPRR filed by ERCOT would have only allowed batteries to provide ECRS and NonSpin at the level they could sustain for six-hours.  The rationale was that any NonSpin/ECRS that was provided by batteries under the current…

The Gist NPRR1108 implements section 13(f) of Senate Bill 3 that states “The independent organization certified under Section 39.151 for the ERCOT power region shall review, coordinate, and approve or deny requests by providers of electric generation service described by Subsection (a) for a planned power outage during any season and for any period of…

The Gist Under Senate Bill 2 the ERCOT Board consists of three ex officio members (Chair of the PUC, non-voting, CEO of ERCOT, non-voting, and Public Counsel for OPUC, voting) and eight independent members appointed by a three member board selection committee.  One of the board selection committee members is appointed by the Governor, one…

The Gist ERCOT demand response has typically been characterized as either in response to transmission cost allocation (4CP) or wholesale price allocation. 4CP.  Transmission charges are paid by distribution service providers and transmission level wholesale service customers based on their withdrawal from the transmission system during the Four Coincident Peak (4CP) fifteen-minute intervals, one each…

The Gist NPRR1093 was filed by ERCOT to allow all loads capable of reducing consumption within 30 minutes to sell Non Spin (not just loads that could respond to a SCED dispatch, as was the status quo prior to NPRR1093).  This was partially just a recognition that loads could provide Non Spin and partially an…

The Gist The ERCOT market uses three separate mechanisms to form prices.  The first is supply and demand (including the Power Balance Penalty Curve); the second is the Operating Reserve Demand Curve (ORDC); the third is the Reliability Deployment Price Adder(RDPA). Supply and Demand.  ERCOT holds auctions in the Day Ahead and Real-Time markets that…

The Gist Using a single model for battery storage (rather than a generation resource and a Controllable Load Resource) is introduced in NPRRs 1002 and 1014.  The protocols are written on top of the Real-Time Co-optimization NPRRs, and as such currently need to be implemented after Real-Time Co-optimization.  This dependency could be changed, however, by…

The Gist If crypto mining takes off in ERCOT to a multi-GW scale it could pose reliability problems given the way that crypto miners respond to price (or at least how they are perceived to respond to price).  As crypto miners are not profitable over $100/MWh (very rough, obviously the exact number depends on current…

The Gist This Planning Guide Revision Request (PGRR) would ensure that a planning study would not consider a congestion problem “solved” if that solution required a dispatchable resource to be dispatched below a certain output threshold. There was some confusion about what the “minimum duration threshold” referenced in the PGRR actually meant. (It means that…