Ancillary Service Workshop Kicks Off: Grid Roundup #31

PUC Staff is holding a workshop this afternoon to explore key questions related to procurement of backup reserves and how to balance reliability and affordability

The PUC Staff kicked off a workshop on ancillary services, the backup reserves deployed before, and hopefully to prevent, rolling outages. Senate Bill 3 passed in 2021 after Winter Storm Uri required a comprehensive review of ancillary services and that is finally happening. After Uri, ancillary service volumes more than doubled and now the PUC and ERCOT are thinking through how much backup is appropriate.

The workshop is live streamed here. The agenda is here.

Before the workshop, ERCOT filed an ancillary service overview report and the PUC asked a series of questions of stakeholders and got 23 responses. Below are the main points of disagreement among commenters which will be discussed in detail today.

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