ERCOT: Texas gears up for proposals to integrate DERs

Dive Brief:

The grid operator for most of Texas has disbanded a task force examining the high level ideas involved with bringing distributed assets into the wholesale market, and will soon be tackling the detailed issues which need to be addressed.
The Electric Reliability Corporation of Texas formally dissolved its Distributed Resource Energy & Ancillaries Market (DREAM) Task Force two weeks ago.
Some ideas are already in the works, Greentech Media reports. Shell Energy Services has floated a plan to bring larger gas and diesel distributed generators into the market as emergency resources, but more work will need to be done when it comes to smaller behind-the-meter assets.

Dive Insight:

It's not clear exactly what direction Texas will move in, now that ERCOT has disbanded the DREAM Task Force, but the grid operator is not stopping work on bringing distributed assets into the market. Chad Blevins, chairman of ERCOT’s Emerging Technologies Working Group, told GTM that the task force was convened to draw attention to distributed resources and significantly heighten awareness.

"Now that we’ve done that, market participants said we should really get into the part of the process where interested parties can write up and file a nodal protocol revision request,” Blevins said.

ERCOT kicked off the task force in the fall by issuing a white paper that began conceptualizing a similar market structure and process to California's own attempts to being DERs online.

Electric systems are dealing with "dramatic change," and the DREAM concept paper was "intended to serve as a catalyst for development of new protocols and other market rules affecting DERs in the ERCOT region and ERCOT wholesale markets," ERCOT said.

Greentech Media reports Shell Energy Services has floated an idea called “ERCOT-Directed Dispatch of Price-Responsive Distributed Generation," aimed at gas and diesel-fired distributed generators. But the proposal is focused on larger DERs and not aggregation of smaller resources.

Changes at that level would require something called an "operating guide revision request," which would address specific issues in bringing distributed resources into the ERCOT market.