Executive Summary
Today’s WMS meeting was dominated by two big debates; what should Firm Fuel Supply Service (FFSS) look like (lots of open questions listed below), and how much NonSpin and ECRS should batteries be able to carry (ERCOT is standing firm on 4 hours for NonSpin, 2 hours for ECRS). Other than that there was a brief update on Rayburn’s securitization efforts (financing to close by the end of the month), an explanation of the Day Ahead Market delay yesterday (bad load distribution factors), the amount of NonSpin that needs to be provided by SCED dispatchable resources (ERCOT still doesn’t know how they are going to determine that), some thoughts on the Capacity Demand and Reserve report (maybe we should account for netted load behind the meter more carefully now), and the reduction of unsecured credit offered to munis and coops (reduce the cap to $27.5M will be proposed by commenters).
Agenda
Notes
- Securitization Update – Rayburn is expected to get financing to pay their past due invoices to ERCOT this month; ERCOT will work to quickly distribute the money to those who were short paid in the period of emergency.
- DA Market Delay for Operating Day 2/2/22 ERCOT (Alfredo Moreno) reported on the Day Ahead Market delay that happened on MOnday 2/1/22 (for operating day 2/2/22). It was related to some Private Use Network distribution factors that needed to be updated. The entire set of distribution factors has been updated for today’s DA Market, so ERCOT doesn’t expect to see problems going forward.
- NPRR1120(Firm Fuel Supply Service) was discussed. The NPRR submitted by ERCOT was designed to be open ended and leave many policy decisions to the RFP that will be released later in the year. That being said, market participants still had significant questions and issues; namely
-
-
- Possibly including deployment into Reliability Deployment Price Adder calculation.
- Possibly reducing the period of service as starting on November 15th might not give resources enough time to complete their outages prior to the start of the FFSS period.
- Making sure that outages related to preparing for FFSS were approved
- The definition of FFSS should possibly be revisited, as it mentions “maintaining system reliability” but it is really just to provide firm fuel service
- Clarification of how FFS will be deployed
- Whether offsite storage + firm transport could qualify
- Coordination with blackstart
- Whether profits during deployment should be clawed back
-
- There may be a workshop on this; at the least ERCOT will file comments early next week.
- Load providing NonSpin(NPRR1093) –ERCOT (Nitika Mago) said they are still working out how to determine what (minimum) amount of NonSpin needed to be carried by SCED dispatchable resources. They gave no hints on what the number would be.
- Battery Duration for ECRS and NonSpin(NPRR1096) -This got a lot of debate, but at the end of the day, ERCOT (Jeff Billo) said that if they don’t get 4 hour duration for NonSpin, they will just not qualify any battery resources for NonSpin. ERCOT also revealed (at least I was unaware) that there is a current moratorium on qualifying batteries for NonSpin, so they view this NPRR as what it would take for them to lift the moratorium. ERCOT also stated that they view NPRR1096 as an interim solution and would be happy to discuss more efficient long term solutions.
- Capacity, Demand, and Reserve report (CDR). -During the SAWG update the idea that the CDR report needs to be updated in light of the significant netting that is happening after the passage of NPRR945 (allow netting of loads and gens owned by disparate interests). ERCOT is open to that idea.
- NPRR1112(Unsecured credit elimination or reduction) -Joint commenters proposing reducing cap of unsecured credit limit by 45% to $27.5M.
Discussed Issues
- Rayburn Securitization
- Day Ahead Market delay OD 2/2/22
- NPRR1120(Firm Fuel Supply Service)
- Load providing NonSpin(NPRR1093)
- Battery Duration for ECRS and NonSpin(NPRR1096)
- Capacity, Demand, and Reserve report (CDR)
- NPRR1112(Unsecured credit elimination or reduction)