•	Question #1 What can be done to improve STLF performance when previous day load profile and current day load profiles are obviously different?
                 Can a ‘similar day’ profile be substituted for the previous day profile?

The STLF is a forecast that runs every 5 minutes and predicts the load in 5 minute increments up-to 60 minutes in advance.  This forecast is used by the real-time balancing process to calculate the amount of balancing energy to deploy.  The calculation is the difference between the STLF prediction and the aggregate total of all the ERCOT market schedules.  STLF is a neural network program that uses historical data to forecast the future 60 minutes of load.  The ERCOT operators have the ability to manually offset for any known errors in the load forecast or in the aggregated ERCOT market schedules.  Improvements in the STLF could possible improve the balancing energy deployments but was not a factor in this event given that ERCOT had completely deployed all available Balancing Energy.   

ERCOT has taken the following action since the February 26th EECP event:

ERCOT has built an Adjusted MAI spreadsheet that is used by the ERCOT Operator.  This new Adjusted MAI replaces the scheduled MWs for the wind plants with the AWS TruWind forecast. The operators can look ahead and determine whether we have enough available resources for the day based on the TruWind forecast instead of the resource plan scheduled output for wind resources. There have been hours when the scheduled MWs for the wind plants were significantly different from the wind forecast and the operators were able to plan ahead because of the Adjusted MAI spreadsheet.

Although changes to STLF could be imagined which may be an improvement on the existing application, all such proposals would be new research and development for a market design we plan to abandon in December of this year.  ERCOT recommends no action on STLF.