“There are insufficient standards in place to prevent this event,” she said. She also cited what she called an anti-regulation mindset among many state leaders. On Wednesday, ERCOT chief executive Bill Magness dismissed the idea that moving to a capacity market would have changed the outcome. Those big industrial players were looking for the cheapest possible rate – and building more capacity costs money. The problem, said Mark Rose, also a former LCRA and Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative general manager, was that extra capacity was opposed by large industrial consumers of electricity and led to constant conflict at the PUC. In an 'energy plus capacity' market, they also would be compensated for generating capacity that's maintained but kept in reserve for special or unusual circumstances. The ERCOT grid is what's known as an 'energy only' market, in which generators are compensated only for electricity actually delivered. It's 'complicated': Downtown Austin glowed bright while thousands went without power Larson, the state representative, said Wednesday that 'the power generators asked for a capacity market to build more natural gas power plants during the heat wave of 2011. 'But it's not like they say, 'Here are 1,000 things you need to do,' ' said the executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity since he was speaking about a regulatory agency that oversees some of his work. One coal plant executive who formerly worked in grid operations told the Statesman that the PUC requires operators of generators to sign an affidavit confirming that facilities have been winterized. Messages left by the Statesman with the Association of Electric Companies of Texas and the Texas Pipeline Association asking about winterization practices also were not immediately returned. How to help: And what to do if you need help during Texas' historic freeze The agency recently sent a bulletin to oil and gas operators 'urging companies to monitor and maintain operations as safety permits,' DeSilva said. DeSilva wrote in an email that 'the RRC has strict enforceable rules in place to ensure safe production and transportation of oil and natural gas in the state' but he did not mention any mandates. The messages were not immediately returned.Īgency spokesman R.J. The Statesman also left messages with the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates gas pipelines, asking whether the agency requires gas pipeline operators to winterize their infrastructure and if it requires any kind of proof or affidavit about that winterization. “ERCOT's review of plants indicates that the majority of plants are following their weatherization plans,” says the Extreme Weather Reliability Assessment, filed with the PUC in January. In response to a question from the Statesman, part of the USA TODAY Network, about what the state mandates in terms of winterization, a Public Utility Commission official pointed to a state rule that every year ERCOT must file reports with the PUC addressing whether generators have complied with winter weatherization plans – including “an assessment of the reliability and adequacy of the ERCOT system during extremely cold or extremely hot weather conditions.”

Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio, wrote Wednesday on Twitter.

'10 years ago, the PUC identified the incapacity to deal with extreme shifts in the weather and did nothing,' state Rep.

“It’s not just ERCOT – although ERCOT is going to get hammered over this,” he said. Greg Abbott and other state leaders are calling for investigations and hearings regarding its handling of the emergency.īut Tuttle said there’s plenty of blame to go around. The agency that oversees the state’s main power market – the Electric Reliability Council of Texas – has been getting the brunt of criticism for the ongoing system failure. Texas energy: ERCOT is in charge of Texas' power, but one-third of its board lives out of state 'These recommendations were not mandatory, and over the course of time implementation lapsed,' said the August 2011 report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, titled 'Report on Outages and Curtailments During the Southwest Cold Weather Event of February 1-5, 2011.' A federal report issued in the summer of 2011 found that state officials back in 1989, after another cold snap caused outages, 'issued a number of recommendations aimed at improving winterization on the part of the generators.'

Austin power grids