The manager of the Texas electric grid said Wednesday that it should not be forced to fix a data error that increased electricity costs by millions of dollars and reprice a block of wholesale power sales because generators submit erroneous data so frequently it would have to adjust prices as often as once a day.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas made its comments in response to a complaint filed with the Public Utility Commission by the electricity trader Aspire Commodities in Houston. Aspire asked regulators to require generators to repay a windfall of an estimated $18 million, the result of inaccurate production data sent to ERCOT by the Houston merchant power company Calpine. On May 30, electricity prices soared from $41 per megawatt hour to $9,000 after Calpine mistakenly signaled to ERCOT that it had taken some 4,000 megawatts of generating capacity — enough to power 800,000 Texas homes — offline.
Aspire, lost an undisclosed amount of money on electricity trading as a result of the spike. Aspire estimated that the price spike increased the costs of summer futures contracts by $245 million. Wholesale power prices and the cost of futures contracts are built into retail electric rates.
In its filing with the Public Utility Commission, ERCOT said it would be “imprudent” if it was forced to correct prices because on any given day the grid manager receives wrong information or data sent in error on power availability that affects wholesale prices. ERCOT said that it would cause increased price uncertainty and market instability if ERCOT were forced to reprice trades that move…
Source: FuelFix
