HB_HOUSTON touched $1153/MWh last night, roughly 12x the 24-hour mean embedded in the thesis. That is not a rounding error in a hub that normally trades like a liquid reference point; it is a scarcity print, and it says the evening stack got thin enough to clear at punitive levels.

The backdrop is not subtle. ERCOT’s unplanned resource outage feed showed at least 19,306 events over the last 7 days, though that result is sample-limited, and the sample includes forced reductions across gas, wind, and water units: DEC was down 22 MW, SANTACRU 25 MW, BUCHAN 17 MW, AQUILLA 49 MW, and FOARDCTY another 10 MW on a forced-extension basis. That is not one big failure, just a steady accumulation of missing megawatts. ERCOT’s SCED shadow-price feed also printed at least 7,330 events over the same window, with constraint samples at 6.827 on WESTEX, 46.446 on 630_B, and 62.388 on BOWFMR1. In parallel, the LMP/DART feed logged at least 433,228 events, a reminder that price discovery is active and the system is already moving through a lot of congestion and redispatch.

The market question is whether last night was a one-off evening squeeze or the first signal of a repeatable pattern. If the same outage stack remains in place and the same generation stack is called again into the evening ramp, HB_HOUSTON can reprice quickly before the broader ERCOT screen catches up. Watch Houston versus the wider ERCOT hubs and the behavior of binding constraints into the load pocket: if congestion tightens while operating reserves thin, the spread can widen faster than outright hub averages suggest.

The clean read is that scarcity is no longer theoretical when Houston can print four digits on a routine evening.

> In ERCOT, the price is telling you the evening stack, not the average day, still owns the tape.

Not investment advice. For informational purposes only.