Texas QSE Would Pay $125,000 Under Settlement With Texas PUC Staff

Twin Eagle Resource Management, LLC would pay $125,000 under a settlement with Staff of the Public Utility Commission of Texas to resolve Staff's investigation of Twin Eagle for alleged violations 16 Tex. Admin. Code (TAC) § 25.503(f)(2), concerning compliance with Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) Protocols §§ 6.5.7.9(7) and 6.5.5.2(3), related to failure to comply with ERCOT dispatch instructions and operational data requirements.

Twin Eagle is an authorized qualified scheduling entity (referred to as QTWER1) for the Snyder Wind Generation Resource (ENAS_ENA1).

According to the settlement, ERCOT reported that on April 24, 2015, an issue was escalated, eventually to the Texas Reliability Entity, regarding an alleged failure to curtail generation at ENAS_ENA1 as directed by ERCOT.

Based on information provided to Commission Staff by Texas RE, Commission Staff reviewed curtailment events involving QTWER1 between March 2014 and April 2015.

According to the settlement, Staff's review revealed 29 instances where QTWER1 allegedly did not properly implement ERCOT dispatch instructions

According to the settlement, in general, QTWER1 is alleged to have performed the following actions in these 29 instances as follows:

• QTWER1 reduced the HSL to match the reduced Base Point Dispatch Instruction received from ERCOT instead of ensuring that the telemetered HSL represented the potential maximum output in real time for the WGR. QTWER1 sent curtailment flag notifications to ENAS_ENA1 in each instance, however, ENAS_ENA1 is alleged to have failed to manually reduce the Base Points.

• Due to the incorrect HSL, ERCOT's SCED perceived that the congestion issue requiring the reduced output at ENAS_ENA1 no longer existed and caused SCED to reverse the curtailment instruction by changing the SCED Base Point Below HDL (SBBH) value from "ONLINE" to "OFFLINE."

Generally, Staff alleged that QTWER1's actions had the following impacts:

• The "OFFLINE" value for SBBH (curtailment flag) exempted QTWER1 from Base Point Deviation Charges, which would have been assessed for continuing to generate in excess of the base point dispatch instruction, since charges are only assessed on WGRs during a curtailment.

• Turning off curtailment flag resulted in QTWER1 not being scored for Generation Resource Energy Deployment Performance (GREDP) compliance during any intervals where they were generating in excess of base point instructions.

QTWER1 and ENAS_ENA1 have taken various measures to resolve the issue

Docket 46927