Your point is an interesting one and leads me to an odd conclusion: the presence of wind producers in this market is not a requirement for negative prices. Ass

Your point is an interesting one and leads me to an odd conclusion: the presence of wind producers in this market is not a requirement for negative prices. Assuming the author is accurately describing the market, by definition, the bids of wind producers will always account for a minority of the capacity. Which means the other 70+ percent of the supply is coming from other producers. If your explanation holds, then coal producers and the like were bidding themselves at a loss, which seems like that is a state that could happen even in the absence of wind producers. I can see how the wind producers are affecting this, but they're not a requirement. If there was a transition to considerably lower-usage electrical devices within Texas, the relative gap between demand and capacity of the existing producers would result in the same effect on the market: everyone scrambling to deal with ramp downs even at a loss. It's just that the wind farms produced that gap on the supply side instead.