Grid Status

This past week, a heat wave across the Eastern United States demonstrated the crucial role of coordination between interconnected operators for reliability. Let’s take a look. The Eastern Interconnection successfully navigated a period of widespread heat, benefiting from east-west timing disparities in peak temperatures to avoid serious operational challenges. During tight conditions, grid operators follow a defined sequence of events to bring additional generators online and manage regional commitments. Region-wide stressful conditions pushed grid operators to prepare for emergency conditions, including the first EEA1 of the summer for PJM Interconnection, an EEA1 in Southwest Power Pool, and a Max Generation Alert in Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). Some highlights: - Timing of peak heat from west to east varied, leading to effective interregional cooperation - MISO acted as a pivot by its seams-heavy position between SPP, PJM, and the southeast - Regionally, Net Load and risk peaked on August 27th, aligning with reliability actions. - MISO was a net importer of power from PJM through the event. A Max Gen Alert in MISO alleviated pressure on PJM, which needed to retain internal generation - SPP experienced high load and very low wind output. SPP’s net and gross load converged as wind underperformed Interestingly, none of these regions hit record demand levels during this period. SPP set a new peak last year, but PJM and MISO have not surpassed their all-time highs, which remain more than a decade old.

Yesterday was a record-setting day in ERCOT. Let’s break it down. 1. ERCOT hit an all-time record for demand, but thanks to strong solar generation throughout the day, prices remained under control, even during the peak. 2. As the sun set and solar output decreased, ERCOT set a new record for net load—the demand that must be met by dispatchable sources. It’s important to note that high prices correlate more with high net load than gross load. 3. Battery storage shattered its previous discharge record, sending 20% more power to the grid than previous record set the the day before as ERCOT fully released ECRS. 4. We saw some of the highest sustained real-time energy prices of the year, with the Hub average 15-minute SPP nearly reaching the $5,000 bid cap. The ORDC played a role in maintaining these high prices. 5. ERCOT deployed nearly all available capacity without any reliability issues. Despite a significant drop in PRC and SCED capacity within 5 minutes, 2,000 MW of extra capacity released from ECRS made a critical difference. ERCOT's performance under these challenging conditions showcases the evolving dynamics of our grid and the critical role of all resources in keeping the system balanced.

Predicting coincident peak demand intervals is a multi-million dollar business. Here's how it's getting more complex. As the grid has evolved, avoiding these peak demand intervals that are a significant portion of overall costs has become dependent on market interactions between large flexible loads, batteries, and solar generation. For example, this summer in ERCOT has yet to hit the same demand peaks as last year, but it hasn’t stopped the 4CP program from heating up after many folks identified the wrong day as the coincident peak. With high heat and minimal precipitation in the outlook for the foreseeable future, Texas is likely to see high demand and possibly set coincident peaks for both August and September over the next few weeks. In our latest blog, we leverage data and tools from Grid Status, to explore how the changes in ERCOT are leading to unexpected outcomes when predicting coincident peaks. Read more on our blog: https://lnkd.in/gSV8vjFY If you are a large load, check out this example dashboard to monitor ERCOT 4CP load in real time: https://lnkd.in/gc6zJTNy

If you’ve used Grid Status recently, you probably noticed our new Nodal Price Map. In our latest blog, we provide an in-depth guide to locational marginal prices (LMPs) and how to use our map to analyze them. Since founding Grid Status, we have normalized the different reporting schemes of the ISO/RTOs to provide LMP data for more than 60,000 pricing points. With national coverage of LMP data, we were well-positioned to build what we believe is the first-ever public map of wholesale electricity prices that covers every American market. Our goal was straightforward: to create one place that consolidates real-time and historical wholesale electricity prices across the country. In this post, we: 1. Explain the data behind this map 2. Walk through the meaning of each component of LMP 3. Demonstrate how to use the map to analyze transmission congestion around Data Center Alley in PJM Read the post: https://lnkd.in/gAaN9RPQ

Some demand response action in NYISO today. As load rose, the ISO deployed Special Case Resources (SCRs), a long-standing program. SCRs are a reliability-based demand response program whose participants are able to sell into NYISO's capacity auctions, but not the energy or ancillary markets. State-wide activations are particularly obvious in the North and West zones as the resources in those areas represent a relatively larger portion of zonal demand. In this case some congestion followed the activation which caused price separation - particularly severe in the North Zone. It was another hot day and load was beating the day-ahead forecast, but this activation occurred while load was slightly under 28 GW, well shy of the ~31.5 GW coincident peak load forecast ahead of the summer. Track real-time conditions and more at https://lnkd.in/g4S6MuQB

This morning, a nuclear unit in Texas unexpectedly tripped. What happens when a large generator suddenly goes offline? Using data on Grid Status, we take a look at how pooled resources and advanced operational strategies prevent significant disruptions when shocks occur. Immediately, grid frequency declined. An excursion below critical levels required a fast response by ERCOT to ensure stability of the grid. In this case, ERCOT swiftly deployed ancillary services, including a significant amount of batteries providing ECRS, to boost the frequency back to normal. Electricity prices responded shortly after the trip. There is out of the ordinary negative price action at the STP nuclear plant pointing to it as the likely source of the outage. To compensate for the outage, some generation must be increased and some decreased. Price signals then reconfigure the generation output in West Texas at 7:40am CT, causing some units to increase output and some to curtail. Is data like this important to you? See this data and more on Grid Status.

Excited to see data from Grid Status front and center in The Wall Street Journal today. This time in an article about investors pouring billions into adding huge batteries to the grid. We may not be building these massive projects ourselves, but we are proud to provide data that can help investors, regulators, and the general public make informed decisions towards the clean and reliable grid of the future. If that mission excites you, please reach out. We're looking to add a couple software engineers and go-to-market specialists to our team.

Tonight's peak load in the PJM Interconnection is forecasted to be at its highest level in over a decade. In the animation here, we can see how the forecast evolved from nothing special to record-setting levels over the past week. Currently forecasted at 154 GW, peak load from 5-6pm EDT is likely to break the system operator’s 2024 summer forecast by several GWs. Getting forecasts correct is tricky but is especially important during a lengthy heat wave. A week ago, PJM didn’t predict that today would break their summer forecast, but by yesterday it looked like a sure thing. And while the forecast has dropped a bit today, it still looks like an easy beat of the 2024 summer forecast. This is the opposite of 2023 where the actual peak came in substantially below the forecast. Over the past decade, east coast markets have often had summer peaks under their seasonal forecasts, although recent load growth forecasts in PJM suggest that trend is likely to change. With an increasing rate of growth, heat doesn’t have to be record-breaking for demand peaks to beat expectations. At the currently forecasted level, it’s possible that today's peak will be the first new addition to the top ten all-time peak load list in over a decade (pending final adjustment by PJM). When we ingest data at Grid Status, we take special care to track all “vintages” of any forecast we publish, so our users can decide which one is most relevant to their use case.

We're getting close to rolling out the biggest update we've ever made to Grid Status and we are seeking users to try it out. It's a complete redesign of the site, centering around a new live nodal price map. There's a lot more to say about this release, but I'll save it until it's officially launched. Please comment or DM if you're interested in playing with it.

Yesterday NYISO provided a nice primer into some of its major price-driving congestion patterns. West to East, Upstate to Downstate, North to rest of state, and Southeast NY to upstate. The only missing congestion was NYC into Long Island, which we'll see more of this summer. While people get excited about $4k or $5k prices in ERCOT, for a few intervals Long Island actually had some of the highest LMPs we saw this spring, approaching $7,000/MWh. We're gearing up to release the public price map so that everyone can stay on top of the grid in real-time this summer.