One of the important benefits of subscribing to Live Power is that you know within 60 seconds of a sudden loss in generation due to a force outage at a power plant. This means that you can quickly react before there are price impacts. Having granular generation and transmission data from Live Power was critical in July because we saw many forced outages at Live Power monitored facilities in ERCOT, PJM, and MISO. For the purposes of this blog post, we are going to dive into the sudden drops at Live Power monitored facilities in ERCOT and how having access to their data within 60 seconds gave subscribers a leg up before prices responded.
The first sudden drop we want to highlight is at Limestone, which suddenly tripped offline at HE 15:05 on 7/6/20. As seen below, the sudden drop at Limestone seems to correlate well with the South Texas - WA Parish transmission line constraint (STP-WAP 345KV STPWAP39_1) binding shortly after. In addition, there was a coinciding large spike in the RT LMP at Hub North to $906 when the constraint bound shortly after Limestone tripped offline.
Digging into the South Texas - WA Parish line constraint, we can see below that the line seems to be throttled to protect a piece of equipment on the grid downstream.
As seen in our Outage Constraint Overlap module below, there seems to be a transmission outage on the EAGLLA 69KV circuit breaker that overlaps well with this constraint. The vertical grey bars underneath the red/pink ticks are when the constraint is active and the black horizontal bars are when the transmission outage is active. As seen below, there have been many times this summer where the transmission outages overlaps well with the constraint.
It’s possible that many of these factors contributed to the $900+ price spike at Hub North after Limestone tripped offline and the South Texas - WA Parish line bound.
On 7/20 at HE 11:47 Oak Grove, a Live Power monitored facility in ERCOT, suddenly dropped offline and there was a corresponding increase in price at Hub North, which spiked up to $250.
As seen below, a corresponding dip in frequency confirms that this was an unplanned outage at Oak Grove.
Stryker Creek Sudden Drop on 7/16/20
On 7/16 at HE 15:11 Stryker Creek suddenly dropped offline, which seems to have contributed to Hub North spiking to $771 at HE 15:21. As seen below, Stryker Creek dropped offline as load was continuing to increase, which likely contributed to the significance of this sudden loss in generation.
As seen below, a corresponding dip in frequency confirms that this was an unplanned outage at Stryker Creek.
Having access to 60 second generation and transmission data from Live Power data, alongside Yes Energy market data (generation outages, transmission outages, and prices), allows you to react quickly when there is a sudden loss in generation so that you can quickly act before there is a price response. By having access to historical data from Live Power, you can determine if generation behavior falls into a known pattern or is atypical, thus you need to act differently.