ERCOT: Battery energy storage (probably) earned $5k/MW on May 8th

On the evening of Wednesday May 8th, ERCOT hit a new record for battery energy storage output.
At their peak, batteries were outputting around 3.2 GW, over a gigawatt more than the previous record.
So, what actually happened? Let's take a look at the timeline of events.
At midday on Tuesday 7th, ERCOT issued a Weather Watch for the following day. This was due to unseasonably high temperatures, and high levels of generator maintenance.
Around 24 GW of thermal resources were offline, which was about 10 GW more than ERCOT would have expected for May.
Prices for Day-Ahead Energy hit $2,200/MWh, and Ancillary Service clearing prices largely followed suit.
With wind generation resources producing between 5 GW and 7 GW across the afternoon, Net Load peaked at 55.2 GW, as solar generation ramped offline.
This was the highest Net Load experienced in ERCOT in the last thirty days, by nearly 8 GW.
Real-Time prices peaked just below the $5,000/MWh System-Wide Offer Cap.
At the same time, ERCOT manually deployed over 3 GW of Ancillary Services, to help mitigate the lack of capacity.
We've provisionally estimated daily battery revenues of just over $5,000/MWh for May 8th.
This would make it the most lucrative day for battery energy storage in ERCOT in eight months.
However, we won't know precise earnings for another sixty days. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.
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