from Hacker News

Bidding error sees Finnish day-ahead power price tumble

by anttiai on 11/23/23, 7:31 PM with 119 comments

  • by iaw on 11/24/23, 12:30 AM

    Unless you have a strong familiarity with ISO/FTR markets this article will be pretty opaque.

    The short version is that electricity delivery forecast is managed by a financial optimization process. Market participants (generators, line owners, and consumers) basically buy and sell their electricity in advance. Sometimes as far ahead as 2 years, all the way up to the day before (at which time the real time market takes over IIRC).

    So in addition to the primary stakeholders you have financial participants that buy/sell electricity without having access to any apparatus for the generation/transmission/consumption. These participants sometimes have very manual processes for buying their contracts.

    My guess would be some poor fresh grad was under supervised and transposed the source and sink address. Instead of buying at 203.40 they sold at 203.40 by reversing the source and sink.

  • by yorwba on 11/23/23, 11:24 PM

    Fingrid published two messages that sound like countermeasures to deal with the fallout: https://umm.nordpoolgroup.com/#/messages?publicationDate=all...

    > Fingrid has closed intraday trade in directions FI>SE1 and FI>SE3 to ensure system security and balancing capacities concerning the non-matching situation in the Finland bidding zone after Day-ahead trades. Update: Intraday trade in direction FI>EE closed

    > Fingrid is prepared to initiate Intraday purchases, if necessary, to ensure system security and balancing capacities concerning the non-matching situation in the Finland bidding zone after Day-ahead trades.

  • by upsuper on 11/24/23, 12:45 AM

    It's only -€0.2/kWh, not that bad at all. I've been seeing spot price predicted to be -A$1/kWh in several states in Australia (which is the lowest possible bid allowed by regulation). Even in Europe, I recall seeing some post desperately trying to figure out how to curtail their solar export because the price was reaching -€0.34/kWh. Not sure an error of -€0.2/kWh is anything newsworthy TBH.
  • by MadVikingGod on 11/23/23, 11:54 PM

    The three remaining crypto bros in Finland will finally make money mining for Bitcoin.
  • by euroderf on 11/23/23, 11:21 PM

    Sounds like someone at NordPool didn't test their black box very well.

    (AFAIK the bidding resolver is a proprietary black box provided by a contractor.)

  • by MauranKilom on 11/23/23, 10:52 PM

    This is a very terse note. Is there simply not more information available than "some price went negative on the market because someone made a mistake", or am I missing something that's implied here?
  • by keule on 11/23/23, 11:51 PM

    I understand put options and short selling, but how on earth can the price of a commodity sink below zero? How can you make a „sell“ order that is negative? Can someone explain please?
  • by ttkari on 11/23/23, 10:50 PM

    What a good time to heat up the sauna.
  • by terom on 11/24/23, 3:07 PM

    https://www.fingrid.fi/sahkomarkkinat/sahkojarjestelman-tila... shows a roughly +1GW (~12GW -> 13GW) rise in consumed power during the first two hours after the price hitting the negative pricing floor (-500€/MWh) at 15:00. Seems like there's some consumer elasticity there, but not enough to make the grid fall over.

    This is after the national grid operator planned to intervene as necessary and imposed some restrictions on trading [1], but those seem to have been lifted and the intra-day market is working (at 10× normal volumes).

    > Fingrid is prepared to initiate Intraday purchases, if necessary, to ensure system security and balancing capacities concerning the non-matching situation in the Finland bidding zone after Day-ahead trades.

    > Update 24.11.2023 12.:12 Market situation has normalized due to Intra day trading. Fingrid resumes normal operations. Fingrid asks BRP to manage their balance normally.

    > Fingrid has closed intraday trade in directions FI>SE1 and FI>SE3 to ensure system security and balancing capacities concerning the non-matching situation in the Finland bidding zone after Day-ahead trades.

    > Update: Intraday trade in direction FI>EE closed

    > Update 24.11.2023 12:25 Intraday trade is open to all directions

    [1] https://umm.nordpoolgroup.com/#/messages?publicationDate=all...

  • by cratermoon on 11/24/23, 1:11 AM

    How much money was or will be lost as a result of this? Is this a Knight Capital -level error?
  • by sigurdjs on 11/23/23, 10:49 PM

    Very strange that no one noticed this error as it was ~60% of Finlands average daily electricity consumption
  • by api on 11/23/23, 10:50 PM

    Quick! Train Llama 3!