Hope is not a strategy to keep the lights on, Texas must assure it
Former ERCOT IMM supports mandatory reliability standard in ERCOT, #1 TCPA recommendation for reliability through the competitive market.
Former ERCOT IMM supports mandatory reliability standard in ERCOT, #1 TCPA recommendation for reliability through the competitive market.
Texas policymakers are looking for scapegoats for the February outages, but Texans have a collective inability to blame natural gas.
The official autopsy of the great Texas winter blackout of February 2021 quickly established a clear timeline of events: Electric utilities cut off power to customers and distributors as well as natural gas producers, which in turn triggered a negative feedback loop that sunk the state deeper and deeper into frigid darkness.
In comments to the Texas PUC in a proceeding on weatherization standards, Texas Competitive Power Advocates (TCPA) recommended that the PUC adopt a cost recovery mechanism, perhaps through a non-bypassable charge, for facilities subject to new weatherization mandates for whom cost-of-service ratemaking is unavailable.
Following the events of Winter Storm Uri, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway proposed a plan that would allow for the company to finance the building of 10,000 megawatts of new, natural gas-fired generating capacity at a cost of $8 billion. Berkshire Hathaway, being a company in business to generate profits to investors, proposes to make a profit from this enterprise as well. Its proposal would be for electricity consumers to reimburse it for the cost of building and operating the plants under a formula that would guarantee it would generate a seemingly reasonable 9.3 percent rate of return on the investment.
Michele Richmond, executive director with Texas Competitive Power Advocates, argues against the plan on behalf of the power generators of Texas in this Forbes article, written by David Blackmon.