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Clearing price for supplying power to Texas grid –$31.65
- asmithmd1 6y agoI was not sure I was reading the map correctly, but it is true. If you rushed to get a power plant online because they were begging for power and offering $9k/MWhr, they are now charging you $30. http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/20210220_real_time_spp http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/20210220_real_time_spp
- spacemanmatt 6y agoI believe that is an accurate description of disincentivizing oversupply. I hate ERCOT.
- mrDmrTmrJ 6y agoWhy 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?
- asmithmd1 6y agoThey 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 3 years from now. The prices they will pay are between $3-$5/MWhr. Maybe a little more than electricity in TX in 2024 (but who knows). No power plant operator is going to hit the $9,000/hr “gusher”, but it will be available and they will get paid.
- mrDmrTmrJ 6y agoRespectfully, I don't see the issue as one of choosing to have a capacity market. There was ample excess capacity (at least 26GWs!), just no natural gas to run it as the natural gas infrastructure was frozen. 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?
- WalterBright 6y ago> Do you see it differently? Yes. If minute-by-minute retail electricity pricing was there, then there'd be a large incentive to winterize the fuel supply, because the ones who didn't would lose out on the profits from higher electric rates from the ones who did.
- kristjansson 6y agoAren’t the generators already selling into a spot market that saw a multi thousand percent price increase in this demand peak, and are thus so incentivized? Providers AIUI are not responsible for any physical infrastructure, they’re selling volatility reduction by buying power from generators at spot and and sending it down publicly managed lines to customers for fixed rates. I buy your point up thread that more responsive retail pricing would’ve reduce demand faster[1], but I think generators just failed to foresee the failure points of their systems and the potential severity of winter events despite significant incentives to do so. Since the spot price hit its statutory cap, you might argue that the limit on potential windfall profits rendered winterization ROÍ negative - which might be true but if the only way to keep the lights on is to let the generators plan on pillaging a state in crisis, the state might want to step in to provide support beforehand. [1] leaving aside the point the ‘reducing demand’, in this instance, means poor people are cold or worse.
- throw0101a 6y ago> I ask because I broadly understand ERCOT to have delivered the lowest prices and the highest reliability over the last decade. Until they didn't. Until any money savings you may have gotten over the last decade was eaten up by what will be the cost of the burst pipes and flooding of your house. How are ERCOT's prices compared to El Paso's? > El Paso Electric said they always try to prepare for the future and after a winter storm in 2011, the utility company worked towards replacing and upgrading their equipment. Many generators now have antifreeze protection. > "We went from plus-10 degrees which was what the original equipment was designed for to a minus-10, so currently everything we install or upgrade is done to a minus-10 degree sustained temperature," said Louie Guarderrama, director of operations for the utility company. * https://kvia.com/news/el-paso/2021/02/15/el-pasos-not-seeing-power-outages-like-the-rest-of-texas-and-heres-why/ https://kvia.com/news/el-paso/2021/02/15/el-pasos-not-seeing...
- khuey 6y ago> Until they didn't. Until any money savings you may have gotten over the last decade was eaten up by what will be the cost of the burst pipes and flooding of your house. Yeah but that's going to be paid for property insurers or perhaps federal disaster relief funds. ERCOT successfully externalized the cost of coping with frigid temperatures, allowing them to provide power at lower prices.
- Olreich 6y agoExternalizing costs might be good for business, but it’s pretty clearly not good for customers here.
- kevingadd 6y agoIf this happens consistently enough, your insurance prices are going to go up. Disaster relief funds aren't unlimited either, and you can experience significant delays when the time comes to go ask for them to pay out.
- adolph 6y agoThat’s great that El Paso got this failure mode right. Are there other modes that they de-prioritized? Is holding them up as a model of success a form of "resulting" [0] since we don't know what counterfactuals in which they would have failed? El Paso Energy is interesting bc it represents the old school community monopoly.[1] I wonder if the JPM buyout will help or hinder its mission. 0. https://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/the-resulting-fallacy-is-ruining-your-decisions https://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/the-resulting-fallacy-is-ru... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paso_Electric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paso_Electric
- spacemanmatt 6y agoERCOT is just part of the GOP-designed grid that has refused to weatherize, even after multiple "100-year events" that happened inside 15-20 years. Now we're burying Texans because a few officials think this is what freedom looks like. Did were those ERCOT's power plants or ERCOT's companies or was it even ERCOT's purview to tell them to weatherize? Of course not. Does ERCOT serve the same boss as Republicans and energy companies? Absolutely. I hope that better explains why I hate ERCOT, lest you think everyone who has an opinion different than yours is a fool. I am used to that. Most people have no idea how little Texans care for GOP go-it-alone politics.
- bdonlan 6y agoUnfortunately, storage of electricity is quite difficult; supply and demand therefore need to be balanced at all times. An oversupply (ie, overvoltage or excessive frequency) will damage equipment, so prices go negative to encourage those plants which can go offline quickly to do so; generation stations which take longer to shut down or start up, on the other hand, tend to stay running.
- Dylan16807 6y agoIn the immediate term, sure. In the medium to long term you probably want some central management that can ensure extra capacity exists. When you depend on the spot market for everything, this happens, and you encourage an attitude of "yeah you're begging for power but I very likely won't get paid for it so why should I care?".
- WalterBright 6y agoGasoline pump prices always retails for the spot price, and no shortages have occurred since 1980 when Reagan repealed all oil & gas price/allocation controls. This is despite plenty of oil shocks, wars, refinery explosions, the current freeze preventing gas transport, etc. Nobody has reported gasoline shortages in Texas.
- Dylan16807 6y agoIt's really easy to store gasoline. This makes the spot prices far more stable, and in case of shortage you don't instantly cripple households. And households that run out can easily get an alternative. It's a completely different product, so the ideal market is different.
- WalterBright 6y agoIn the 1970s, the feds decided they could set prices and allocate gas far more efficiently than the market. The result was many years of gas shortages and long lines. Reagan's first act in 1980 was an Executive Order to repeal all of that. The gas lines disappeared literally overnight, and have not returned in 40 years. I don't buy that anything is fundamentally different about electricity. > case of shortage you don't instantly cripple households The point of market pricing is you don't have shortages. The price rises until demand drops to match the supply. Rolling blackouts and peaker plants would be unnecessary with market pricing. Demand for electricity is very elastic. I'd change my behavior if rates doubled. Wouldn't you, too? I bet you could easily cut your consumption by 50% without any particular hardship. Put on a sweater, read a book instead of watch TV, lights on only when you need them, turn off exterior lights, shorten the time your computer goes into power saving mode, etc. A lot better than rolling blackouts.
- fallingknife 6y agoYou hate ERCOT for disincentivizing oversupply?
- spacemanmatt 6y agoNo. Is that your real estimate of an actual Texan who just saw neighbors lose power and water for up to 9 days during a historic freeze? There is a body count of 75, last I heard.
- tankenmate 6y agostrangely every time i have tried to access the ercot site i keep get an "access denied" error. i wonder if it is because it thinks i am in europe, or maybe some other reason.
- tankenmate 6y agojust found another HN article, it appears that most people outside of Texas and/or the US are being blocked.
- herpderperator 6y agoI've noticed that happen when browsing from outside the US on many sites recently, including Ercot. Extremely annoying. It's companies paying for Imperva's web firewall ("Cloud Application Security") that just blocks IPs based on country for no reason. https://www.imperva.com/why-am-i-seeing-this-page/ https://www.imperva.com/why-am-i-seeing-this-page/
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoWell it's annoying for we rubberneckers, but presumably not for no reason. If your business literally only caters to people from Texas, why not decrease potential problem/attack/whatever vectors by dropping all other traffic?
- hlieberman 6y agoGood God, the Texas power grid is so fucked by speculation.
- mrDmrTmrJ 6y agoWhy do think speculation is an issue here? My understanding is that electrical markets are physical markets in that you literally have to either provide capacity (electricity) or take delivery (use the electricity) to participate. And you need a utility level power meter (for buyers/users) or to pass a detailed interconnection queues (for sellers/providers) to participate. The reason prices go negative is federal production tax credits incentivizes wind power producers to be able to bid a negative price and still make money. Said differently, the negative price in the market is outweighed by the positive revenue from the production tax credit. Am I missing something here about the structure of the 15-min real time power market? I'm asking as I'm genuinely trying to learn more about this stuff.
- cosmolev 6y agoHow can you speculate an asset that can't be stored?
- Matheus28 6y agoSo all these Giddy costumers who had a $10k bill because they were tied to wholesale prices should now turn on the A/C to the max and get paid?
- LatteLazy 6y agoYes, assuming you're actually linked to the actual spot price. Too much supply means we need to increase demand, so go create demand!
- jetrink 6y agoContext: > For wind developers, federal tax credits also are a contributing factor, even allowing the wind resources to make offers at negative prices. However, low and/or negative offers are not limited to any particular resource, and it is not uncommon for thermal generators to submit negative prices to decrease their chances of being dispatched below their desired or capable levels. > ... > Market prices tend to go negative when there is low consumer demand and the thermal generators that have chosen to remain online cannot be backed down further to allow the available, lower-cost wind generation to serve consumer demand. In situations like this, some wind generators will be curtailed to balance generation with load. In these cases, since wind is the marginal generation, it sets the market price, which may be low or negative.In 2019, system-wide negative pricing occurred for 58.5hours, or less than one percent of the year. http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/200196/Wind_One_Pager_June_2020.pdf http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/200196/Wind_One_Pager...
- asmithmd1 6y agoIf your job is to establish a stable market between producers and consumers, and the market price you set swings positive and negative, through 6 orders of magnitude in just 72 hour...you are not doing a good job.
- david-gpu 6y ago...or, hear me out, this system is far more complex than an armchair specialist from HN can understand from reading a couple of headlines, and the actual experts in this subject matter are doing everything in their power to make the system work as best as they can, balancing a zillion opposing forces.
- princekolt 6y agoHmmm... It's almost like solving massive-scale real-life problems is harder than hacking some code together based off medium tutorials
- 6y ago
- idlewords 6y agoThis is the time to shine for all the power plants that bought oil at -$37 back in April.
- haunter 6y ago>Error code: 16 >This request was blocked by the security rules GDPR?
- bretpiatt 6y agoHere's raw table data to look at 15 min spot price per mWh http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/20210220_real_time_spp 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_conditions.html 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.
- lostlogin 6y agoAny indication of what those links showed? I get ‘Access denied’.
- bretpiatt 6y agoReal-Time System Conditions Last Updated: Feb 20, 2021 16:51:26 Frequency Current Frequency 60.007 Instantaneous Time Error -24.595 Consecutive BAAL Clock-Minute Exceedances (min) 0 Real-Time Data Actual System Demand 33772 Total System Capacity (not including Ancillary Services) 60667 Total Wind Output 8646 Total PVGR Output 323 Current System Inertia 223646 DC Tie Flows DC_E (East) -299 DC_L (Laredo VFT) 0 DC_N (North) -219 DC_R (Railroad) 0 DC_S (Eagle Pass) 0
- bretpiatt 6y agoHere's screenshot of 15 min spot price page https://ibb.co/YTzsqdj https://ibb.co/YTzsqdj
- herpderperator 6y agoI've noticed that happen when browsing from outside the US on many sites recently, including Ercot. Extremely annoying. It's companies paying for Imperva's web firewall ("Cloud Application Security") that just blocks IPs based on country for no reason. https://www.imperva.com/why-am-i-seeing-this-page/ https://www.imperva.com/why-am-i-seeing-this-page/
- 6y ago
- ggm 6y agoThe 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 model to get it: its the one federal and texan politicians wanted. A public utility model is not perfect. I argue it would have been better than this, and identified the capex required for systems resiliency before this crisis hit. The energy market is not the solution. The energy market is the problem.
- mrDmrTmrJ 6y agoHonestly, 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 was a energy system failure as Texas regulations did not require the natural gas infrastructure to be winterized. Climate change creates more extreme weather events (in all directions but on average warmer) so polar air meant there wasn't enough methane ('natural gas') to power the turbines and heat. So the issue is the winterization standard in the natural gas infrastructure, but nothing about the structure of the electrical market. Certainly we need stronger resiliency standards! Events people once thought occurred "1-in-100 years" are actually like "1-in-5 years" in their frequency. And this will only get worse. But that's not a market structure issue it's a standards issue.
- godmode2019 6y agoI'm sorry but how does a trace element affect the polar vortex/ jetstream bending. It doesn't. 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.
- 6y ago
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoThis link is specifically for real-time market pricing. This is a marginal rate. 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.
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoThis is the market screaming for energy storage. If large negative-price swings, on account of higher power variability, become commonplace it could very elegantly pay for storage. It would also let storage be compared, apples to apples, dollar to dollar, with base load power supplies.
- m463 6y agoI agree. When oil went negative, it was because there was nowhere to put it.
- iso1210 6y agoWhy can't Texas simply output it's power to neighboring states?
- jasongill 6y agoTexas isn't connected to either of the two national power grids (east and west half of lower 48 states, roughly) so that their power system isn't subject to federal regulation.
- beerandt 6y agoThat's just false- Texas has at least 5 DC interconnects, to both east and west US grids, as well as Mexico. Edit: Check the last section on their real time status page: http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...
- 0xBDB 6y agoThe other half of what the grandparent said also seems completely completely false. Texas is subject to federal (indeed international) regulation through the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, same as the rest of the U.S. and Canada. I don't fully understand why this is being reported otherwise, though, so maybe I'm missing something. https://www.texasre.org/compliance https://www.texasre.org/compliance
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agocan someone give me free money like the ones during the recent oil tanker thing? i was late to the party (timezone thing) and missed out on a lot of cash, darn you physical time barriers
- aaur0 6y agoI am wondering can other states not step in here and help Texas by supplying electricity.
- ncallaway 6y agoLargely not because the TX power grid mostly isn't physically connected to the grid of the rest of the US. https://www.king5.com/mobile/article/news/verify/texas-independent-power-grid/507-6192cf48-4bf4-4a82-8586-0e5c0a549707 https://www.king5.com/mobile/article/news/verify/texas-indep... My understanding is that this was largely deliberate on the part of the state of TX to minimize the impact of federal energy regulations on the TX grid. The idea being that the federal regulations devise their authority from the regulation of interstate commerce via the commerce clause, but if TX chooses not to participate in interstate commerce, the federal regulations don't have authority to apply to TX.
- aaur0 6y agoWow. I hope other states who have a similar setup learn from this and take adequate measures to avoid situations like this in the future.
- mike_d 6y agoNo other state operates its own grid, this is a unique "feature" of Texas trying to avoid federal energy regulation in the 70s. The US (minus Texas) is split in to an Eastern and Western grid, so that a single doomsday event can't knock the entire country offline.
- visarga 6y agoIs there any web page showing the current state of the Texas grid (how much recovered)?
- burlesona 6y agoNot that I know of, but my understanding is that electricity is basically back for everyone, except for some isolated cases where the transmission lines are still being repaired.
- baybal2 6y agoAccess Denied Error 16 www.ercot.com 2021-02-21 13:10:47 UTC If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT HelpDesk at 512-248-6800 or 1-866-870-8124 (USA) or HelpDesk@ercot.com. Imperva
- baybal2 6y agoDid we DDOS them?
- gigatexal 6y agoLikely no. I used a VPN to connect from a Texas server and was able to see the page no problem. Could be a GDPR thing but I didn’t see a cookie popup, so I dunno.
- glenneroo 6y agoI get the same error but at the bottom it says: > This request was blocked by the security rules They are probably just blocking everyone outside the US.
- rocky1138 6y agoSSL Not Supported Error 29 www.ercot.com 2021-02-21 14:25:55 UTC If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT HelpDesk at 512-248-6800 or 1-866-870-8124 (USA) or HelpDesk@ercot.com. Please provide the HelpDesk with the information supplied below. Your IP: x.x.x.41 Error code: 29 SSL is not supported What happened? SSL is not supported Your IP: x x.x.41 Proxy IP: x.x.x.144 (ID 101293-100) Incident ID: 1293000130192584352-408476159010734922
- remoquete 6y agoSame here. Primitive security rules? I guess they just chose to ban all non-US IP addresses.
- mikewarot 6y agoI seems to me that the owners of natural gas fired power plants in Texas are being incentivized to find a way to store a few days of natural gas on site, and winterizing that storage, so they can win the lottery the next time things freeze over. [edit - back of the napkin math] Extrapolating from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=667&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=667&t=3 it looks to me like it takes about 8 ft^3 of natural gas for 1 kwh of electricity. So, to run a 1 GW plant for 24 hours would take 192,000,000 square feet... a cube about 575 feet on each side. That's a huge tank farm. Coal is about 1 lbs/kwh, according to https://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/fuel.html#:~:text=Natural%20Gas%3A%20It%20takes%200.01003,barrels%20to%20make%201%20kWh https://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/fuel.html#:~:text=Nat.... so the 24 Gwh pile would be 24,000,000 pounds, or 12,000 tons. (an 80 foot cube) This matches up fairly well with https://www.brighthubengineering.com/power-plants/52544-basic-calculations-for-a-power-plant-calculating-the-coal-quantity/ https://www.brighthubengineering.com/power-plants/52544-basi...
- guywhocodes 6y agoAt what pressure? Sounds like atmospheric.
- twistedpair 6y ago> So, to run a 1 GW plant for 24 hours would take 192,000,000 square feet... a cube about 575 feet on each side. That's a huge tank farm. Isn't that why most gas is stored as LNG?
- tyingq 6y agoReading about natural gas, it sounds like storage in underground natural geological pockets is common. And also in tanks, but liquified/LNG which is 600x more dense. As for coal, it sounds like they already typically receive coal in 120 train car shipments daily which is close to your 12000 ton figure. I imagine keeping lots of spare train cars around isn't a big engineering task.
- mikewarot 6y ago>I imagine keeping lots of spare train cars around isn't a big engineering task. The solution I've seen in person is the "coal pile", with Caterpillar bulldozers on it, keeping the surface from combusting, and moving things around. They are proven simple technology, and work in winter. Keeping the coal in the train invites disaster, as rail infrastructure has issues with icing conditions.
- burlesona 6y agoI’ll point out that it’s already 50 degrees in Austin today with a projected high of 70. Plus it’s a Sunday, so many businesses are closed. Plus we just had a freak storm that required a lot of 24/7 industrial operations to shut down, and they likely haven’t powered back up yet since the roads were still icy as recently as yesterday. TLDR; demand is now very low, and since the electrical supply has to be matched very closely to demand, this is how ERCOT tells plants that can shut off easily to shut off.
- happyconcepts 6y agoI feel obligated to mention the name "Enron" because I feel Texans deserve to be reminded.