Tag Archives: electricity prices

The two problems to be addressed head on by nuclear power advocates

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Nuclear power advocates bring up the technology as a supposedly necessary part of a zero-GHG portfolio to address climate change. They insist that the “next generation” technology will be a winner if it is allowed to be developed.

Nevertheless, nuclear has two significant problems beyond whatever is in the next generation technology:

  1. Construction cost overruns are the single biggest liability that has been killing the technology. While most large engineering projects have contingencies for 25-30% overruns, almost all nuclear plants have overruns that are multiples of the original cost estimates. This has been driving the most experienced engineering/construction firms into bankruptcies. Until that problem is resolved, all energy providers should be very leery of making commitments to a technology that takes at least 7 years to build.
  2. We still haven’t addressed waste disposal and storage over the course of decades, much less millennia. No other energy technology presents such a degree of catastrophic failure from a single source. Again, this liability needs to be addressed head on and not ignored or dismissed if the technology is to be pursued.
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Why the CPUC’s RA Market Report gives the wrong reliability price metric

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In its annual report on resource adequacy (RA) transactions, the CPUC reports the wrong result for the market price to be used for valuing capacity from the RA market data. The Commission’s decision issued in the PCIA rulemaking on establishing the CCA’s “exit fee” uses this value in error. In the CAISO energy and ancillary services markets, the market clearing price used to set the value of the energy portfolio is determined by the highest accepted bid in a single hour, and then averaged across all hours. In contrast, the average reported RA price in The 2017 Resource Adequacy Report incorrectly reports the average of all transactions. This would be equivalent to the CAISO reporting the average of all accepted bids, including those at zero or even negative, as the market clearing price.

The appropriate RA price metric is the highest RA transaction price for each month. This price represents the market equilibrium point at which a consumer is willing to pay the highest price given how low a price a supplier is willing to provide that quantity of the resource. (The other transactions are called “inframarginal” and such transactions are common in many markets.) In a full auction market, all transactions would clear at this single price, which is why the CAISO reports a single market clearing price for all transactions in a single hour. That should also be the case for the RA market price, except the time unit is a month.

Due to a lack of an auction for the moment, it is possible to manipulate the highest apparent price through a bilateral transaction. Instead, the Commission could choose a price near the highest point, but with sufficient market depth to mitigate potential manipulation. Using the 90th percentile transaction is one metric commonly used based on a quick survey of market price reports.