Executive Summary
WMWG hit four main topics today; NPRR1084 (Require outage reports within a half hour if over 2%), NPRR1092 (Lower RUC Offer floor), Advanced Action Notices, and What To Do About CryptoCurrency Load?
For NPRR1084, look for a market participant to write comments on a compromise solution soon. If you should want to be a part of that, I can figure out whom to put you in contact with.
For NPRR1092 (and also the offer floor part of NPRR1091 – NonSpin adjustments), there was a lot of discussion about whether there should be a new offer floor based on heat rate or whether there should ba a new offer floor at all. THis is a highly contested issue, and it will probably never get a consensus at WMWG; this will need to go to a vote at WMS.
Advanced Action Notices, where ERCOT warns generators that if they don’t push their planned outages, ERCOT might do it for them (via an Outage Schedule Adjustment) happened three times in October. ERCOT gave a report describing each of those instances and what they hope to do better in the future.
Finally, there was some preliminary discussion about the dangers of having a lot of CryptoCurrency mining load on the system that might all turn off every time the price goes over a certain threshold. The thought from the group was that we need to be careful about somehow making sure that they participate in SCED as a controllable Load Resource, rather than just reacting to prices, as having ~1GW of load instantly switching off every time the price goes over (for example) $100 would be a Very Bad Thing.
Agenda
Notes
- NPRR1084 (Require outage reports within a half hour if over 2%) – There was a long discussion about what might or might not be acceptable to ERCOT. Where it stands after all that discussion is that someone in the market community (NRG?) will write comments and try to get those passed by WMS/PRS/TAC. ERCOT is amenable to changing the half hour to an hour. ERCOT is less enthusiastic about changing the 2% to 5%, because they don’t like 5% derates on large coal plants not going into their forward studies. Probably something they could live with is (for example) 5% up to 400MW, 2% there after.
- NPRR1092 (Lower RUC Offer floor). ERCOT presented aggregated offer curve data that showed that most competitive offers are below $80/MWh. Luminant said that they offer their quick start units at around $1000 and those are competitive offers. Consumer load said that they feel there is a market power problem that needs to be fixed right now (and the independent market monitor agreed). ERCOT said that changing the offer floor to a new price (lower than the current $1500) could happen almost instantaneously, but changing it to a heat rate would be a software change. One idea was floated that maybe it could be a change to a new price now and then to a heat rate after the software change is implemented.
- ERCOT presented a report on the “Advanced Action Notices” where they tell resources that they need to delay their planned outages, or else ERCOT will force them to delay their planned outages. They did that three times in October. They will work on improving the process, including clearly communicating when the last time a resource can adjust the schedule on their own and not receive Outage Schedule Adjustment treatment.
- Clayton talked some more about the problems that ERCOT might see if there is (for example) 1GW of very price responsive CryptoCurrency load. ERCOT agrees that this is probably something they need to think about. There was a general belief that it would be good for these loads to be controllable loads and bad for them to just respond to price. This will be discussed more at future meetings.
