Streetwise Professor

Some other power traders–this time in the US–blowed up real good.   Actually preceding the Aas Nasdaq default by some months, but just getting attention in the mainstream press today, a Houston-based power trading company–GreenHat–defaulted on long-term financial transmission rights contracts in PJM.  FTRs are financial contracts that have cash-flows derived from the spread between prices at different locations in PJM.  Locational spreads in power markets arise due to transmission congestion, so FTRs can be used to hedge the risk of congestion–or to speculate on it.  FTRs are auctioned regularly.  In 2015 GreenHat bought at auction FTRs for 2018.  These positions were profitable in 2015 and 2016, but improvements in PJM transmission caused them to go underwater substantially in 2018.  In June, GreenHat defaulted, and now PJM is dealing with the mess.

The cost of doing so is still unknown.  Under PJM rules, the organization is required to liquidate defaulted positions.  However, the bids PJM received for the defaulted portfolio were 4x-6x the prevailing secondary market price, due to the size of the positions, and the illiquidity of long-term FTRs–with “long term” being pretty much anything beyond a month.  Hence, PJM has requested FERC for a waiver to the requirement for immediate liquidation, and the PJM membership has voted to suspend liquidating the defaulted positions until November 30.

PJM members are on the hook for the defaulted positions.  The positions were underwater to the tune of $110 million as of June–and presumably this was based on market prices, meaning that the cost of liquidating these positions would be multiples of that.  In other words, this blow up could put Aas to shame.

PJM operates the market on a credit system, and market participants can be required to post additional collateral.  However, long-term FTR credit is determined only on an annual basis: “In conjunction with the annual update of historical activity that is used in FTR credit requirement calculations, PJM will recalculate the credit requirement for long-term FTRs annually, and will adjust the Participant’s credit requirement accordingly. This may result in collateral calls if requirements increase.”  Credit on shorter-dated positions are calculated more frequently: what triggered the GreenHat default was a failure to make its payment on its June FTR obligation.

This event is resulting in calls for a re-examination of  PJM’s FTR credit scheme.  As well it should!  However, as the Aas episode demonstrates, it is a fraught exercise to determine the exposure in electricity spread transactions.  This is especially true for long-dated positions like the ones GreenHat bought.

The PJM episode reinforces the Aas episode’s lessons the challenges of handling defaults–especially of big positions in illiquid instruments.  Any auction is very likely to turn into a fire sale that exacerbates the losses that caused the default in the first place.  Moral of the story: mutualizing default risk (either through a CCP, or a membership organization like PJM) can impose big losses on the participants in risk pool.

The dilemma is that the instruments in question can provide valuable benefits, and that speculators can be necessary to achieve these benefits.  FTRs are important because they allow hedging of congestion risk, which can be substantial for both generation and load: locational spreads can be very volatile due to a variety of factors, including the lack of storability of power, non-convexities in generation (which can make it very costly to reduce generation behind a constraint), and generation capacity constraints and inelastic demand (which make it very costly to increase generation or reduce consumption on the other side of the constraint).  So FTRs play a valuable hedging role, and in most markets financial players are needed to absorb the risk.  But that creates the potential for default, and the very factors that make FTRs valuable hedging tools can make defaults very costly.

FTR liquidity is also challenged by the fact that unlike hedging say oil price risk or corn price risk, where a standard contract like Brent or CBT corn can provide a pretty good hedge for everyone, every pair of locations is a unique product that is not hedged effectively by an FTR based on another pair of locations.  The market is therefore inherently fragmented, which is inimical to liquidity.  This lack of liquidity is especially devastating during defaults.

So PJM (and other RTOs) faces a dilemma.  As the Nasdaq event shows, even daily marking to market and variation margining can’t prevent defaults.  Furthermore, moving to a no-credit system (like a CCP) isn’t foolproof, and is likely to be so expensive that it could seriously impair the FTR market.

We’ve seen two default examples in electricity this past summer.  They won’t be the last, due the inherent nature of electricity.