ERCOT

ERCOT pays for energy, not standing capacity. Every five minutes, Security Constrained Economic Dispatch clears the system and publishes locational marginal prices for thousands of settlement points, hubs, load zones, and every electrical bus. When the system tightens, scarcity pricing does the work a capacity auction does elsewhere, which is why ERCOT prices can move from routine to extraordinary inside a single afternoon. Because the grid is asynchronously connected to its neighbors through a handful of DC ties, Texas largely solves Texas problems with Texas resources.

Geography does the rest. Wind concentrated in the west and the Panhandle, booming load in the Permian Basin, solar stacked into the same daylight hours, and demand centers far to the east, so congestion between west and east is a structural feature, not an event. The public record is unusually deep: SCED shadow prices name the binding constraint, system lambda splits energy from congestion, and the 60-day disclosures eventually reveal what every generating unit and controllable load was told to do (and did) at five-minute resolution.

That disclosure lag is the research edge. Sixty days after the fact, ERCOT publishes per-resource dispatch, telemetry, limits, and ancillary-service responsibility for the whole fleet. Ask the Grid keeps that archive queryable next to the live feeds, so a question can move from what is happening right now to how the fleet actually behaved the last time it happened.