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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…

The Gist Real-Time Co-optimization (in the ERCOT sense) refers to a set of rule changes that would enable ERCOT to choose the most efficient set of resources to provide Ancillary Services in its real time market.  The Public Utility Commission said that ERCOT should implement it in 2019,  but then it was delayed  Important Actions…

The Gist As part of phase 1 of the PUC’s market redesign efforts, ERCOT was directed to implement a firm fuel service, as imagined in Senate Bill 3.  It would be paid to gas generators that have onsite fuel storage to run for at least 48 hours.  This will be implemented in two phases; the…

The Gist NPRR1092 was proposed by the independent market monitor (IMM) for ERCOT and originally set out to reduce the current RUC offer floor of $1500/MWh to $75/MWh.  Later, an additional concept was added which would remove the “OPT OUT” choice for resources that get RUC’d.  The thought behind the original concept is that there…