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Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

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Re: Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Finn, probably just send out a message on some social media platform that people need to start turning on their saunas for the stability of the network. (Alternatively, like fingrid did, send a notification to my phone saying to "consume energy normally, as the pricing issue does not reflect energy availability") Even a fairly small electric sauna is ~10 kW, so that's be just 10000 homes solving that problem.

Those saunas wouldn't get turned on if they weren't getting paid for the trouble.

Very few people get paid during this market anomaly. Most people have fixed rate contracts, and the few that do have variable rates, even fewer have ones where the negative price would be passed on to you.

Transmission cost and taxes will still be present, so this is more of a "hey it's going to be a societally good thing to go to the sauna today instead of tomorrow, consider it!" (Also, the saunas are definitely in use, don't worry, nobody's going to pass up the opportunity to say they went to the sauna for a good cause.)

Re: Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

#102
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> -A$1/kWh in several states in Australia (which is the lowest possible bid allowed by regulation) It's telling they regulate the price and won't allow it to go "too low", just like they halt trading on the stock exchange if things go down too much. Free market my backside - can't let those profits dip!

Price floors don't mandate high profits because you can just not purchase if you don't want to. Subsidies would.

They mandate the price will never go so low they will loose money.

Imagined you could buy gas wholesale for a dollar a gallon and the price floor retail was two…. Guranteed to make money

Re: Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales are final. The seller (Norwegian Kinect Energy) will need to negotiate with other major marker participants to bail them out. But it’s likely in the interest of everyone of not to let them collapse. The markets would be in disarray if there would be undo button for a trade. Preparations need to be made by large industry participants for every daily allocation.

It's Scando, so i would imagine that if the relevant ministers in FI SE NO all sign off, and no major market players (like Fortum) object, then they'll unwind it and fall back to replaying the previous day's bids. Or is this impossible ?

Responding to peer comments:

This is pretty clearly NordPool's fuckup. There's no way in hell this bid should have gone thru without human review. Seems clear that their UI is to some degree - in some critical spot - fragile, user-hostile, ill-designed.

You can say that in analogous cases, finance firms have been put out of business by bad bids caused by slipped fingers. Granted. But in this case you're throwing a wrench into a power grid, with the potential to cause a system disruption, in winter no less.

Re: Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

#104
post #36

Unless you have a strong familiarity with ISO/FTR markets this article will be pretty opaque. The short version is that electricity delivery forecast is managed by a financial optimization process. Market participants (generators, line owners, and consumers) basically buy and sell their electricity in advance. Sometimes as far ahead as 2 years, all the way up to the day before (at which time the real time market take…

Looking at the pricing curves it looks more like hourly vs cumulative screw-up. See how the supply keeps creeping forward: https://aggregated-market-data-latest.nordpoolgroup.com/Aggr... (note: haven't found a permanent link to today's results, so that link is valid until 1200 UTC)

If you have the pdf of the 24, I would love to see it.

Re: Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

#105
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah thank you. I remember now. Still weird that this can also happen (and is allowed to happen) in an energy market.

This is in fact a very good feature. When power is cheap or negative it's because there is more generation than load in some segment of the grid. To fix this you can tell people to stop generating, you can tell people to start loading, or you can just drop the price and let both happen on their own. There are targetted ways this is done when the difference is so big it threatens grid stability, but its often better t…

> There are some things markets are very good at. This is one of them.

Ironic in a thread about the market making up a totally imaginary generation surplus.

10-20% of Finnish retail customers are on spot market based contract, and stand to save up to something on the order of 0.40€/kWh consumed (net after taxes and fees) off their electrical bill for the reminder of the day. I suppose every market-rational consumer would have a 10kW electric space heater outside melting snow on the ground, maxing out their supply.

Re: Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

#106
https://www.fingrid.fi/sahkomarkkinat/sahkojarjestelman-tila... shows a roughly +1GW (~12GW -> 13GW) rise in consumed power during the first two hours after the price hitting the negative pricing floor (-500€/MWh) at 15:00. Seems like there's some consumer elasticity there, but not enough to make the grid fall over.

This is after the national grid operator planned to intervene as necessary and imposed some restrictions on trading [1], but those seem to have been lifted and the intra-day market is working (at 10× normal volumes).

> Fingrid is prepared to initiate Intraday purchases, if necessary, to ensure system security and balancing capacities concerning the non-matching situation in the Finland bidding zone after Day-ahead trades.

> Update 24.11.2023 12.:12 Market situation has normalized due to Intra day trading. Fingrid resumes normal operations. Fingrid asks BRP to manage their balance normally.

> Fingrid has closed intraday trade in directions FI>SE1 and FI>SE3 to ensure system security and balancing capacities concerning the non-matching situation in the Finland bidding zone after Day-ahead trades.

> Update: Intraday trade in direction FI>EE closed

> Update 24.11.2023 12:25 Intraday trade is open to all directions

[1] https://umm.nordpoolgroup.com/#/messages?publicationDate=all...

Re: Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

#107
post #74
post #38

It's only -€0.2/kWh, not that bad at all. I've been seeing spot price predicted to be -A$1/kWh in several states in Australia (which is the lowest possible bid allowed by regulation). Even in Europe, I recall seeing some post desperately trying to figure out how to curtail their solar export because the price was reaching -€0.34/kWh. Not sure an error of -€0.2/kWh is anything newsworthy TBH.

Are there really large solar PV installations that can’t curtail, continuously, all the way to zero? An MPPT ought to be able to operate arbitrarily far away from the maximum power point. Or is there some other limitation that prevents this?

[deleted]

Re: Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

#108
post #106

https://www.fingrid.fi/sahkomarkkinat/sahkojarjestelman-tila... shows a roughly +1GW (~12GW -> 13GW) rise in consumed power during the first two hours after the price hitting the negative pricing floor (-500€/MWh) at 15:00. Seems like there's some consumer elasticity there, but not enough to make the grid fall over. This is after the national grid operator planned to intervene as necessary and imposed some restrictio…

>Seems like there's some consumer elasticity there, but not enough to make the grid fall over.

This has been widely reported as a market error, so many consumers might understand that the cheap electricity is not because there's a massive amount of electricity up for grabs but rather because some Norwegian company fucked up.

Perhaps if this was a real situation where there is actually a huge energy surplus that more consumers would actually "waste" electricity.

Re: Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

#109
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like something a toxic middle management bro might say to be edgy. If this is easier for you to understand, you might have a problem.

you’re right, sex workers take deposits for this specific reasons and have autonomy and agency, it’s weird and outdated to deny [probably] women that thanks for pointing that out it’s a big plot hole and very much unlike the energy market. although maybe deposits would be an improvement to the energy market

a deposit has nothing to do with it, you need to dump the electricity or the entire grid will have a bad time.

Re: Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

#110
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price floors don't mandate high profits because you can just not purchase if you don't want to. Subsidies would.

They mandate the price will never go so low they will loose money. Imagined you could buy gas wholesale for a dollar a gallon and the price floor retail was two…. Guranteed to make money

They're losing money if nobody buys from them, because they have overhead to stay open.
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