Settlement point price
The official price at which energy is actually bought and sold at a named location in ERCOT — the number invoices are computed from.
The grid computes prices at thousands of electrical buses, but nobody writes contracts against an anonymous bus number. A settlement point is a named, published location — a specific power plant's node, a trading hub, or a load zone — and the settlement point price is the official price there for each interval. It is the number that actually appears in the math when ERCOT settles who owes whom.
ERCOT has three kinds of settlement points. Resource nodes are where individual generators and batteries are paid for their output. Hubs — like the widely traded ERCOT North Hub — are averages over many buses, built to give traders a stable, liquid reference. Load zones are large regional averages at which most consumption is charged.
The practical upshot: a generator is paid at its resource node but is often hedged at a hub, and the difference between those two prices — basis — is a risk it has to manage. When you see a headline ERCOT price, you're almost always looking at a hub or load-zone settlement point price.
For the technical reader
In ERCOT's real-time market, settlement point prices are time-weighted averages of SCED LMPs over the 15-minute settlement interval: at a resource node, the average of that bus's LMPs; at a hub or load zone, the average of a defined weighting of many bus LMPs (hub definitions are fixed bus sets; load zones are load-weighted). Day-ahead settlement point prices come directly from the day-ahead market clearing at hourly granularity.
Real-time SPPs can also include adders — notably the operating reserve demand curve (ORDC) adders that lift prices when reserves are scarce — so an SPP is not always a pure average of LMPs. Settlement then applies these prices to metered or scheduled quantities per interval, which is why the settlement point, not the bus, is the atomic unit of commercial exposure in ERCOT.