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A comment on The Texas electric grid failure was a warm-up. Parent comment

Re:The Texas electric grid failure was a warm-up by mschaef on Thursday January 20, 2022 @10:15AM (#30009884)
> manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour.

$9,000 was a cap. If it wasn't for the cap, I'm sure prices would have gone up much higher under market rules. (ie: It's not like the market operators pushed prices up to that point, the operators capped it at that point.)

> (By comparison, the average hourly price in 2020 was $25.73

Commodities markets are notoriously volatile when there is mismatch between demand and supply. (There are also cases where power prices go negative, when there is more supply than demand. What's happening there is that generators are paying for the right to say online, on the premise that a shutdown is more costly. For large baseload units, this can absolutely be the case.)

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Re:The Texas electric grid failure was a warm-up by zardo on Thursday January 20, 2022 @12:44PM (#30012093)
> (ie: It's not like the market operators pushed prices up to that point, the operators capped it at that point.)

That's exactly what the article says happened. They brought on extra power generation which dropped the market price, which they then overrode manually.

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