Since the February power outages, Texas legislators have been busy weighing a host of improvements for the state’s grid, from weatherizing equipment to shaking up oversight to partnering with the billionaire investor Warren Buffett on new emergency-use power plants.
But hardly any of them have focused on what some believe could be a more widespread fix: plugging into other U.S. power supplies.
While Texas has long opposed opening its grid to avoid federal oversight, and …
Houston — The Public Utility Commission of Texas on April 7 initiated a revision to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ scarcity pricing rule to ensure that a “circuit breaker” change in the systemwide offer cap, designed avoid harming consumers, does not create what the chairman called “absurd results.”
At issue is the switch from ERCOT’s $9,000/MWh “High Systemwide Offer Cap,” or HCAP, to the “Low Systemwide Offer Cap,” known as LCAP, which is the higher of either $2,000/MWh or 50 times a fuel index price chosen by the grid operator. ERCOT has set that …