ERCOT does not have a capacity market. So you can’t get paid merely to have a functioning plant that will never run.

It is the only market not to have one. So you get to set the price when you do run. The price limit is 9999.99 which is the DB column size for price AFAIK.

https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c...

Capacity markets are kind of controversial these days even in countries which do have them, because by design they're subsidies for inefficient fossil fuel power plants that wouldn't be viable if they had to compete to sell power on the open market, and especially for coal power plants which are meant to go away ASAP due to global warming. Texas in particular would have had to subsidize coal power for a capacity market to make a difference in the recent grid failure. The current trend for new fossil fuel plants is natural gas but that wouldn't have done any good since a major cause of the blackouts was that even the existing power generators couldn't get enough natural gas to continue operating. Coal plants don't have this problem because they can store large quanties of fuel on site, but they've been closing down in Texas and throughout the US and the rest of the developed world.

As long as renewable energy advocates refuse to subsidize sufficient reliable backup capacity as part of the cost accounting in pricing renewables, events like Texas will become even more common, and in places that can't just blame it on "because Texas".

> wouldn't be viable if they had to compete to sell power on the open market

Capacity markets are "the open market". They're a market for a different product - the option to request power during a later period. And when we're discussing power shortages with catastrophic results, that lack of capacity is a lot more important than specific resulting spot price.

Environmentally it's better to keep an extra coal plant operational than to have everyone install their own backup generators (and ad-hoc fuel storage!) to mitigate the problems with "best effort" grid supply.

Perhaps we should be happy they're apparently running COBOL on a mainframe, so the price limit was not INT_MAX.

From what I remember of COBOL I would feel much safer with that than to use INT's for money calculations...

What's wrong with ints for price calculations? Are you thinking floats?

IT's the only US market that doesn't have one. No European country has a capacity market except for the UK (and that one was preposterously held up in court for a period of time).

Yes, but that's a separate concern from keeping them all on right now.

Are you saying with confidence that was the motivation? And that still isn't much of how they make the decision including how long to override it.

And even the capacity markets others have (particularly the timespan) over-incentivize natural gas (more CO2) over nuclear (almost carbon-free).