Executive Summary
At today’s SAWG ERCOT presented the Long Term Load Forecast (LTLF) and the Capacity, Demand, and Reserve (CDR) report. The biggest take away is that the CDR will undergo major changes soon; these will be run through the normal stakeholder process, but they will likely have the implicit approval of Commissioner McAdams. The biggest of these changes is the move towards determining Effective Load Carrying Capacity amounts for resources.
Calvin Opheim also presented on the Long Term Load Forecast (LTLF). The changes in the LTLF versus last year are that they did see a decrease in future loads, and they expressly tried to model rooftop solar. They plan to model electric vehicle load in next year’s report, but it wasn’t expressly modeled in this year’s report.
Agenda
Notes
- ERCOT (Calvin Opheim) reviewed the Long Term Load Forecast (LTLF)
- Covid has had an impact that remains (the LTLF for 2025 -for example- is lower than last year’s LTLF for 2025 which is lower than the previous year’s LTLF for 2025)
- New this year is they have actively tried to factor in rooftop solar; all data represents their attempt at netting out rooftop solar.
- They are factoring in about 1000MW of crypto load in the far west; it was raised that that may not be appropriate in the peak.
- They did not adjust the LTLF for increased penetration of electric vehicles. They are looking to add that in next year’s LTLF.
- Link to LTLF page here
- ERCOT (Pete Warnken) presented the most recent Capacity Demand and Reserves (CDR) report
- Load forecast drops increase margin by around 2.7%
- New projects (since last CDR) increase margin by about 0.7%
- Delayed projects reduced margin by about 7.4%
- New retirements and mothballs reduced the margin by about 0.7%
- Changes to modeled Private Use Network capacity, wind and solar capacity factors, and resource rating changes when taken together resulted in a decrease of about 0.2%
- The net result was a margin decrease of 4.9% when compared to the CDR published in May 2021.
- Some cosmetic changes to the CDR report. The most important was the addition of different reserve number scenarios. The difference in the scenarios is what criteria ERCOT places on whether a new resource counts towards the margin or not.
- ERCOT (Pete Warnken) discussed possible changes to CDR
- Pete’s group will huddle with ERCOT executives and Commissioner McAdams to discuss what major changes to do to the report.
- These changes will be introduced to the stakeholder process in the normal way; mostly via NPRRs
- The biggest change is a possible move towards using an Effective Load Carrying Capacity technique to determine the capacity impacts of various technologies. That is, rather than looking backwards and seeing how much of a certain type of generation was available over peak, they would do some sort of Astrape like study to see what increase in sustainable load an addition would provide.
- They might also do a net load forecast rather than a load forecast.
- Another possibility is increasing the standards of what sort of prospective resource gets included in the CDR.
