The Electric Reliability Council of Texas ran its “one day-ahead market” under the new nodal configuration yesterday and say that, as of last night, the old zonal market has been laid to rest forever.
Nodal is a market redesign and technology upgrade designed to enable location-specific pricing at more than 4,000 nodes instead of the four large and cumbersome congestion management zones used in the market design lo these many years here in Texas.
The project has been in the pipeline since 2003 and several target dates for taking it live had come and gone over the years. The surcharge passed on to customers has also spiraled, going from about 5 cents per megawatt hour in the beginning to nearly 17 cents.
The increases were needed to keep up with the ever-rising cost estimates that started at around $60 million but ended up at nearly $660 million.
The Public Utility Commission estimates that over time, electric retail customers will see significant savings under the new configuration, but getting it in place has been difficult, time-consuming and expensive.
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There are a lot of generation Nodes, how many load nodes?
That depends on if you are looking at trading nodes or measurement nodes, the total is 8000 monitored, 4000 nodes in both directions. Its generating a massive amount of data and seems to have improved generation dispatch, and increased participation 10x in the day ahead market as Reps and loads hedge their bets. Load is averaged across the 15 minute interval rather than the 5 minute generation interval, and load is measured across trading zones to smooth out the congestion costs.
Lots of improvements already planned for 2012, 2011 is going to be stabilization and fixing known errors i the system