Topics

The Gist As part of Phase 1 of the PUC’s Market Redesign efforts, the PUC called for ERCOT to “Improve transparency of price signals to load resources, including changing demand response pricing from zonal to nodal”.  ERCOT is looking into doing so, and their initial thoughts are: to first implement this only for large, single…

The Gist Due to a mix of planned and forced outages during Winter Storm Uri Brazos Electric Co-op had essentially no generators operating during much of the $9000/MWh pricing, resulting in essentially $2B of charges from ERCOT.  Brazos declared bankruptcy and the matter is currently in court. Important Actions 3/3/22 ERCOT and Brazos agree to…

The Gist NPRR1088 would adjust credit/collateral requirements.  A little background first.  The current (extremely complicated) calculations used to determine the collateral required to participate in the ERCOT market include Forward Adjustment Factors that are the average North Hub price in ICE for the next three weeks divided by the recent average price of the North…

The Gist Due to Rayburn and Brazos having large (around $3B in total) default in the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri, ERCOT determined that it was probably not a good idea to offer unsecured credit to anyone anymore, even public power.  This NPRR removes unsecured credit from the ERCOT market.  It has received significant push…

The Gist Currently ERCOT uplifts defaults to all market participants based on total MWh market activity share.  In practice this tends to send most default uplift (charges) to CRR Account Holders.  There is currently a proposal in the Credit Working Group to multiply all CRR MWh by a scalar (something less than 1) so the…

The Gist Securitization N is a term used to describe a set of payouts and charges designed to lessen the economic impact of certain charges that were assessed to Load Serving Entities (LSEs) during Winter Storm Uri.  House Bill 4492 amended (among other things) Subchapter N of section 39, utilities code, to allow ERCOT to…

The Gist Securitization M is a term used to describe a set of payouts and charges designed to lessen the economic impact of the defaults of competitive (i.e. non public power) entities on their ERCOT invoices during Winter Storm Uri.  House Bill 4492 amended (among other things) Subchapter M of section 39, utilities code, to…

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…