Were regulators right to push power prices to the maximum in Texas?
FacebookTwitterEmail
Yi-Chin Lee, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
With power generators knocked offline and outages rolling across Texas on Feb. 15, wholesale electricity markets in Texas presented a puzzle. Power was trading between $1,000 and $2,000 per megawatt-hour, a very high price, but not one that reflected the severe power shortages crippling the state.
That evening, the Public Utility Commission stepped in, ordering the state’s grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, to declare a level three emergency and push wholesale prices to the maximum allowed, $9,000 per megawatt-hour, where they stayed for much of the next few days.