ERCOT TO RUN SIMULATIONS OF LONG-LEAD REAL-TIME PRICING NEXT SPRING
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas will do simulations in the spring on a program that could allow real-time market participation for units that need as much as 30 minutes’ lead time, state regulators learned Thursday.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas received a status report regarding the concept of a multi-interval real-time market, which would expand the real-time market from its current single five-minute interval to a time horizon that extends to 30 minutes or more. That time horizon is “subject to stakeholder discussion,” ERCOT said in its report.
In effect, the market would generate prices at five-minute intervals to the time horizon, but only the first five-minute interval’s prices would be financially binding.
The longer time horizon would enable “more efficient commitment and dispatch of the current fleet of resources,” ERCOT said, and could encourage more resources to participate in the real-time market, such as demand-response resources and those that take more than five minutes to ramp up or that have limitations on how short or long they can run.
However, the success of the concept depends on the accuracy of forecast loads, variable renewable generation and the status of generation resources, it added.
“If MIRTM commits a resource and the subsequent binding price in real-time is lower than the resource’s offer … price, the resource will be entitled to a make-whole payment,” ERCOT said in its report.
These make-whole payments that would be paid by load on a load-ratio share basis are also known as “uplift,” about which Commissioner Ken Anderson expressed concern.
