The ups and downs of June 2022’s 4CP

One down. Three to go. ERCOT’s Coincident Peak for June will most likely be called for Thursday, June 23 at 5:00 pm with 76.6 GW of energy consumed.

For ERCOT customers that pay peak demand charges, (looking at you medium and large commercial users), you are hopefully aware of the Four Coincident Peak (4CP) program. To calculate your peak demand charges for the following year, ERCOT takes the 15-minute period that saw the highest level of energy being used for each summer month (June-September), then averages those four intervals.

If you are able to reduce demand during that time, you can lower your bill by hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month. But the tricky thing is nobody knows when peak alerts will occur.

A lot of companies, including Amperon, offer services to help identify peak alerts before they happen. This way businesses can prepare in advance to reduce demand.

Amperon’s 4CP Alerts are based on our AI-demand forecasts which are updated hourly and incorporate the latest changes to weather models. We run predictions twice a day and assign a 0-99% possibility of a CP event will be that day. If the prediction is over 90%, we will send out 2 emails for the day:

One alert at 3:00 am CT that is indicative of the probability of a CP event occurring that day.
Another alert at 11:00 am CT as CP events almost exclusively happen in the later afternoon.

JUNE 13

We sent our first “call” for the month at 3:00 am predicting peak demand at 5:00 pm.

But when the 11:00 am predictions were run, that probably dropped to 58%.

Even though predicted peak demand only dropped by .1 GW, our forecasts shifted the probability of a peak alert after calculating a higher peak-demand in the future. Demand turned out to be way lower than what Amperon or ERCOT predicted, possibly because other companies assumed this would be a 4CP day and shifted usage. Since everybody is making their own guesses on when a 4CP day will happen, if enough companies choose the same day and hour to curtail demand, they can essentially nullify that day as a 4CP day.

JUNE 20

We sent another call at 3:00 am predicting peak demand at 6:00 pm.

But by the time the 11:00 am call was sent, probability dropped to 69% because we began forecasting Thursday and Friday to be higher days.

JUNE 23

Again at 3:00 am, we were 99% confident peak demand would hit not only that afternoon at 5:00 pm, but the next day at 5:00 pm as well.

But when 11:00 am came around this time, we were confident today would hit peak demand around 5:00 pm.

JUNE 24

The call at 3:00 am and 11:00 am stayed consistent, with a 99% probability demand would peak at 5:00 pm.

RESULTS

After four calls at 3:00 am, with two of those revoked, which hour had the highest demand for the month?

Thursday, June 23 at 5:00 pm with 76,592 GW of energy being used.

Hopefully, your company was able to curtail demand during this time. But if not, there are still three more months and three more attempts to reduce your peak demand charges for next year.