31–40 of 266 posts
Here's raw table data to look at 15 min spot price per mWh http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/20210220_real_time_spp Here's overall grid conditions in real-time http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi... You can see the massive excess capacity which is why pricing has gone negative now, total opposite of earlier in the week, grid may fail now from overload instead of brown out.
Presumably, power companies locked in their pricing using the day-ahead rates yesterday according to their forecasts and risk models. Now there is a surplus of energy production, and it actually makes sense to pay companies to take that electricity out of the grid.
You can see the current day-ahead rates by selecting DAM-SPP from the Select Data dropdown at the bottom.
The negative marginal rates is an interesting phenomenon, of course, but the real-time marginal rates alone don't show the whole picture.
The market in power should only exist to optimise. Its become a rei-ified good in its own right, and is being gamed by bad faith actors with stranded assets (coal, oil) to make a point about green power and capital investment money they want. It's possible no power network could have avoided some of this, but its patently obvious a regulated power utility function needs investment, and the market is not the best mode…
Honestly, I reach a very different conclusion. Comparing ERCOT to other grids (PJM or CALISO), ERCOT system has delivered very low prices and very high levels of renewable penetrations. PJM wastes billions of dollars a year in capacity payments to coal plants for no reason. What you write, "The market in power should only exist to optimise" well, that is exactly what ERCOT does. As for the disaster last week, that wa…
Its not a good argument if all weather situations can be explained by "climate change".
It's too hot - climate change It's too cold - climate change
What you are describing is called weather.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you hate ERCOT? I ask because I broadly understand ERCOT to have delivered the lowest prices and the highest reliability over the last decade. A far better outcome than PJM or CALISO. Last weeks failure was because the natural gas pipeline infrastructure isn't winterized - a separate issue from the structure of the electricity market. What leads you to a different opinion?
They may have delivered low prices, but it was at the cost of ignoring handling “black swan” events. As the ERCOT CEO said, If they had not blacked out millions of customers, grid and consumer equipment would have been destroyed - wiping out all the accumulated cost savings. ERCOT does not pay producers for standby capacity. Just this week the New England grid completed its annual auction for capacity to be available…
So what was the nature of the failure? Well, there was not resiliency standard that required the natural gas infrastructure to be winterized. Because this infrastructure froze, the state ran out of methane ('natural gas') to run it's massive excess capacity.
Now this isn't hard to do, Siberia, New England, and Scandinavia all have massive natural gas infrastructure that's fully winterized. But Texas never required that winterization, so they ran out of actual methane when they needed it most and then the turbines could not turn.
Said differently, the underlying issue is regulatory and 'energy system' one - having a capacity market (like PJM or New England ISO) would in no way have changed the outcome because the state would still have run out of methane.
Do you see it differently?
The market in power should only exist to optimise. Its become a rei-ified good in its own right, and is being gamed by bad faith actors with stranded assets (coal, oil) to make a point about green power and capital investment money they want. It's possible no power network could have avoided some of this, but its patently obvious a regulated power utility function needs investment, and the market is not the best mode…
Honestly, I reach a very different conclusion. Comparing ERCOT to other grids (PJM or CALISO), ERCOT system has delivered very low prices and very high levels of renewable penetrations. PJM wastes billions of dollars a year in capacity payments to coal plants for no reason. What you write, "The market in power should only exist to optimise" well, that is exactly what ERCOT does. As for the disaster last week, that wa…
Externalities are, in my opinion, one of the primary reasons for market failure.
The market in power should only exist to optimise. Its become a rei-ified good in its own right, and is being gamed by bad faith actors with stranded assets (coal, oil) to make a point about green power and capital investment money they want. It's possible no power network could have avoided some of this, but its patently obvious a regulated power utility function needs investment, and the market is not the best mode…
Honestly, I reach a very different conclusion. Comparing ERCOT to other grids (PJM or CALISO), ERCOT system has delivered very low prices and very high levels of renewable penetrations. PJM wastes billions of dollars a year in capacity payments to coal plants for no reason. What you write, "The market in power should only exist to optimise" well, that is exactly what ERCOT does. As for the disaster last week, that wa…
The market in power should only exist to optimise. Its become a rei-ified good in its own right, and is being gamed by bad faith actors with stranded assets (coal, oil) to make a point about green power and capital investment money they want. It's possible no power network could have avoided some of this, but its patently obvious a regulated power utility function needs investment, and the market is not the best mode…
You can't simply mandate that energy prices will be a certain amount if the power plants still have to buy natural gas and other power sources from the free market. If you tried, the power plants would simply shut down when it wasn't profitable according to the legislated rate, making the problem even worse.
If you tried to legislate that power plants or energy producers must sell energy at a fixed cost no matter what it costs them to produce and they can't shut down, they have to price that risk into their long-term model. You're now paying more for the same service just to make it worth someone else's while to take the risk.
The energy market at least provides a feedback loop to large, energy-consuming businesses. Large consumers of electricity like manufacturing facilities will simply decide to shut down when energy prices are too to be profitable, and wait for the cost to go down. You don't see this as a homeowner, but there are industries that adjust their schedules around energy pricing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah yes, the appeal to authority argument. I can’t have anything valuable to say because I am not an authority. I am sure running a power grid with thousands of producers and millions of consumers is incredibly complex. Did you know every wind turbine and generator is spinning exactly in sync across the whole grid. I am amazed that it works. What obviously does not work is the libertarian fantasy of live market pricin…
> libertarian fantasy So what do you recommend? Mandatory lights/heaters/AC on/off times, so the power produced is actually used, and the power needed is actually produced? The british have the problem that during a football game half-time, a bunch of people start their tea kettles at the same time, and there is a relatively huge spike in electricity usage... this means, that the electricity providers have to plan fo…
The market in power should only exist to optimise. Its become a rei-ified good in its own right, and is being gamed by bad faith actors with stranded assets (coal, oil) to make a point about green power and capital investment money they want. It's possible no power network could have avoided some of this, but its patently obvious a regulated power utility function needs investment, and the market is not the best mode…
No, unreliable power sources such as wind, solar and gas are the problem.
Except for a short outage due to a sensor failure, the four nuclear reactors have been steadily supplying electricity.
The overall availability of nuclear across the United States is >90%. It’s far more reliable than any other source of electricity.
> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
To avoid such outages in the future, Texas needs to build more nuclear reactors.
No other source of energy is weather-independent, can store fuel supplies for several years on site, is emission free and extremely high capacity factors.
The market in power should only exist to optimise. Its become a rei-ified good in its own right, and is being gamed by bad faith actors with stranded assets (coal, oil) to make a point about green power and capital investment money they want. It's possible no power network could have avoided some of this, but its patently obvious a regulated power utility function needs investment, and the market is not the best mode…
Honestly, I reach a very different conclusion. Comparing ERCOT to other grids (PJM or CALISO), ERCOT system has delivered very low prices and very high levels of renewable penetrations. PJM wastes billions of dollars a year in capacity payments to coal plants for no reason. What you write, "The market in power should only exist to optimise" well, that is exactly what ERCOT does. As for the disaster last week, that wa…
Is that difference more then the human lives lost, property destroyed and time wasted during the last few days?