That’s a burden that will be passed onto Texans in the form of higher electric bills, whether they get their energy from the retail providers that serve most of the state or from a municipal or cooperative utility. What’s more, those costs would come “without causing much new significant capacity to be built or predictable reliability improvements over time,” Alison Silverstein, a former adviser to the PUCT and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission who helped craft ICF’s analysis, said during a Wednesday press conference.Īnd because key details remain unclear about how NRG and Exelon’s LSEO plan would assess the costs of paying generators to remain available to provide power during grid emergencies, it’s possible that the plan could drive up costs to wholesale energy market participants by as much as $ 30 billion in 2025, the report finds. It’s also 90 percent more than the report’s cost estimates for the next-most-expensive reliability option under consideration at the PUCT. That’s nearly as much as the roughly $ 25 billion in wholesale electricity bought and sold across the ERCOT market annually. The ICF report indicates that instituting the proposal could increase wholesale electricity costs by $ 22. The LSEO plan is the centerpiece of PUCT Chair Peter Lake’s strategy to meet the Texas legislature’s mandate to improve the resilience of Texas’ electricity market. The ICF’s report puts hard cost figures on the controversial Load-Serving Entity Obligation ( LSEO) proposal made by power plant owners NRG Energy and Exelon. Since then, the PUCT and state grid operator ERCOT have made several changes to how the state’s energy market operates with the goal of making sure that such a catastrophe never happens again.īut now, as the PUCT prepares to make a second round of policy changes in early 2023, a growing number of stakeholders are demanding that the commission consider a full spectrum of reform plans. 5 million Texans without power, many for up to a week, and led to hundreds of deaths and an estimated $ 100 billion in economic damage. Lawmakers ordered the PUCT last year to take steps to prevent repeats of the February 2021 winter blackouts that left about 4. It underscores rising concerns from consumer and energy industry groups that the Public Utility Commission of Texas ( PUCT) is ignoring competing ideas for strengthening the state’s grid against extreme weather. That’s the stark conclusion of a report released last week by consultancy ICF on behalf of the Texas Consumers Association.
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