Aug 24th, 2021 Extreme prices - Discussion

[Randy - RRTP since Aug 2012]

Some of you may have noticed this extreme event on Aug 24th.

It reminded me of the importance of keeping an eye on the text alerts, but this was way in excess of any peaks I've seen before.

I'd love to hear of ways that anyone has setup an extra alert around these really higher events.  Ideally, I'd have a text alert at over $.10 or something, and another for over $0.20, which would also go to my Google home, etc.

[Bob Fairbairn]

Same here.  The emails from Comed are no good, and too late.

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[Randall C.]

I'm assuming anyone on RRTP would be load shedding between those hours anyway to reduce capacity charges. The hour ending 3PM Central Time on August 24th was the highest demand for ComEd since 2018 and the hour ending 4PM Central Time on August 24th was the highest demand for PJM this year so far. All of this information is available to the public on PJM's Data Miner 2. Both ComEd and PJM have APIs, so if you have some skill with coding, you can automate checking prices and demand and have alerts sent to you. Predicting the 5 CPs is fairly easy and accurate, but predicting prices is not. Looking at this year's price charts, there seems to be no rhyme or reason why prices will jump by random amounts at random times during the day. Even if you were to set up an alert based on 5 minute prices, I've seen some hours start normal and end up in the stratosphere, giving no time to shift loads. And demand and pricing don't always go hand in hand. PJM/ComEd are a capacity market, so even if demand is high, if PJM has arranged for enough capacity, prices could stay fairly normal. August 24th was expensive because, in order to maintain enough capacity, they had to get electricity from more expensive sources, or that's at least my theory. 

[J Jon Smith]

Just sharing... I have installed the free and open source, 'Home Assistant' to automate turning on and off appliances with $10 plug devices, automatically throughout my home as a general Home Automation system, when the ComEd 5 minute price goes over a set amount. This amount can be set differently for different devices and can also be triggered with other things like time of day, weather, geo location, time of year etc. It also interfaces to my home HotTub/Spa with a $5 device too. Needless to say, it heats it primarily when the price is low. Just so you know.

The learning curve on Home Assistant is not for everyone. We can hope that the forthcoming Matter protocol will ease things, but with all the big biz behind it, I am not holding out much hope for it not making us the product again.

jjon 

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On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 11:04 AM Randall C. <randallj...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm assuming anyone on RRTP would be load shedding between those hours anyway to reduce capacity charges. The hour ending 3PM Central Time on August 24th was the highest demand for ComEd since 2018 and the hour ending 4PM Central Time on August 24th was the highest demand for PJM this year so far. All of this information is available to the public on PJM's Data Miner 2. Both ComEd and PJM have APIs, so if you have some skill with coding, you can automate checking prices and demand and have alerts sent to you. Predicting the 5 CPs is fairly easy and accurate, but predicting prices is not. Looking at this year's price charts, there seems to be no rhyme or reason why prices will jump by random amounts at random times during the day. Even if you were to set up an alert based on 5 minute prices, I've seen some hours start normal and end up in the stratosphere, giving no time to shift loads. And demand and pricing don't always go hand in hand. PJM/ComEd are a capacity market, so even if demand is high, if PJM has arranged for enough capacity, prices could stay fairly normal. August 24th was expensive because, in order to maintain enough capacity, they had to get electricity from more expensive sources, or that's at least my theory. 

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[rzi...@gmail.com]

'''ll of this information is available to the public on PJM's Data Miner 2. Both ComEd and PJM have APIs, so if you have some skill with coding, you can automate checking prices and demand and have alerts sent to you.''''

I've contacted ComEd about adding demand information to their replay of the PJM data, we'll see.  For PJM itself, do you have API access, or are you scraping?  A while back I reached out to sign up for the data feed, and they quoted a setup fee of $2500 and a license of $5000/year.  That's put a dent in my Hourly Pricing savings.  Since then they've migrated to Data Miner 2, but I haven't found any good info on API access.

There used to be a nice (simple, HTML-only) market data page with the current dispatch rates, but I think they realized it was a little too easy to scrape.  

[rzi...@gmail.com]

Overall this has been a wild summer for pricing.  Not sure if these are echos from the low demand (and pricing) of 2020, or if the recent changes to the capacity market are behind it (didn't think those have kicked in yet, but I'm not sure).  

Even late night pricing has been getting some spikes.  

[Randy - RRTP since Aug 2012]

I'm going to start with an account (free one it appears) and see how far I can get with my API. It does look like they have a free tier now though.

I do wonder how far I can get before something in the ToS puts a stop to my work.
If I can get a prediction API in place, we can see how much we can integrate this with other things.

I do wish they'd make a lot of this a public dataset rather than force everyone to setup an API to download the data.  They have some terms about not posting the data out publicly to protect the PJM 'members', so that kind of puts a dent on that public dataset option, until CUB or a federal entity moves them.

On Saturday, October 2, 2021 at 11:04:49 AM UTC-5 rzi...@gmail.com wrote:

[rzi...@gmail.com]

Any luck with the API?  I've played with scraping some data, or issuing some API requests in a round about away, but it's all very fragile.  I don't do anything live with their data, but I do download CSV data for some analytics.

A streaming API would be great.  There used to be a _very_ easy to scrape page for all the dispatch rates, but they pulled it.