Electric Utilities

Federal Appeals Court Ruling on Lawsuit Against EPA is a Partial Loss For Dallas-based Luminant and Enviros

The ongoing legal war of many fronts among Dallas-based Luminant, the state of Texas, the EPA and environmentalists is mostly a war of incremental victories.This week, EPA arose victorious. Next month or year? Anybody's guess. Just know that this time, nobody (except the EPA) is totally happy with t ... More >>

Hedge Fund Says Tottering, Dallas-based Electricity Giant is Screwing Creditors

Aurelius Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund and perpetual pain-in-the-ass for distressed companies like Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, sued the massive utility in federal court Tuesday for $725 million. It claims Energy Future made some sweetheart intra-company loans even as ... More >>

ERCOT Says There May Not Be Enough Juice in the Power Grid To Prevent Rolling Blackouts This Summer

Just in case all this temperate whether has lulled you into the perception that the Texas power grid doesn't have the thinnest margin of safety between lights on and lights out anywhere in the country, here's a reminder: Summer is coming. ERCOT, the grid operator for most of Texas, says the odds th ... More >>

U.S. Electricity Grid Watchdog to ERCOT: You Aren't Doing Enough to Keep Lights on in Texas

Gerry Cauley, the chief executive of the North American Electric Reliability Council, the national, industry-funded grid-integrity watchdog, is pretty worried about Texas. Power-reserve margins here have slipped below the levels recommended to meet peak demand, and future projections show it will on ... More >>

Power And Family

Texas Electricity Generators Got Another Big Bailout from State Energy Regulators Yesterday

Here we are, some 10 years into the deregulation of the Texas electricity grid, and a crisis approaches. Supply, it is predicted, will not keep pace with demand in the very near future. Generators say electricity prices are simply too low to justify the financing of new power plants. In fact, in at ... More >>

Clean Energy Coalition Calls for PUC to End Foot-Dragging on Solar Regulations

Wind, sun and bullshit: Texas has plenty of all three, and we've done a good job converting wind to electricity. So, why hasn't the sunny Lone Star State done more to create more power from the sun? Well, you could blame the bullshit. Today in Austin, The Clean Energy Works for Texas coalition, a ... More >>

Someone Really Should Explain to Mitt Romney How Markets Affect Coal

If your debate-watching drinking game included a shot for each use of the word "coal," you either peed on your roommate's couch or had your stomach pumped. Or both. The primitive fuel was invoked some 22 times, apparently, mostly by Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor ... More >>

Report Predicts More Shutdowns of Coal-fired Power Plants, But Not in Texas

Rock-bottom natural gas prices have forced the wonks over at the Brattle Group to revise their national prediction for the number of coal-fired power plants likely to retire in the coming years steeply upward. And when we say steeply, we mean by some 25 gigawatts, or roughly enough electricity to po ... More >>

There's a War on Coal Raging in Rep. Ralph Hall's Head

We haven't checked in on our favorite congressman, Representative Ralph Hall (R-Antediluvian Era) lately. Not since he dove from a functioning aircraft dressed in nothing but a form-fitting American flag. Turns out, he's been rummaging through a dusty, cobwebbed steamer trunk stuffed with contracept ... More >>

Dallas City Hall Battles Oncor Over How the City Can Spruce Up its Trails

The swaths of land that run underneath Oncor's electric transmission lines are in many ways ideal spots for jogging trails. They stretch for miles, are largely free of obstructions and are controlled by a single entity, eliminating the types of property issues that would make construction anywhere e ... More >>

Federal Appeals Court Upholds Texas Challenge to EPA Power Plant Pollution Rule

A split three-judge panel of a federal appeals court rejected an EPA rule that would curb the drift of harmful power plant pollutants across state lines. The agency, the majority ruled, had overstepped its authority under the Clean Air Act. The legal challenge was mounted by a number of states and ... More >>

Mitt Romney Wants to Kill Wind-Power Tax Credits, Which Worries Texas' Wind Industry

Mitt Romney did himself no favors in Iowa when a spokesman told the Des Moines Register the candidate would "allow the wind credit to expire, end the stimulus boondoggles and create a level playing field on which all sources of energy can compete on their merits." In Iowa and much of the Midwest, t ... More >>

Texas Has the Worst Electricty Grid in the Nation

You might have already figured this out given the perennial threat of rolling blackouts and grid operator ERCOT's own admission that, come 2013, there won't be sufficient wattage to cover peak demand, but the state's electrical grid isn't the best. In fact, as the Texas Tribune reports today, it's t ... More >>

EPA Accuses Dallas-based Luminant's North Texas Power Plants of Clean Air Act Violations

Dallas-based Luminant, the electricity generation arm of Energy Future Holdings, got hit with a violation notice from the EPA Friday, accusing it of completing major modifications to its northeast Texas coal-fired plants, Big Brown and Martin Lake, without installing modern pollution control devices ... More >>

In August, the Price Cap on Electricity in Texas Will Jump 50 Percent

Texas electricity regulators voted today to raise the price cap on wholesale electricity from $3,000 to $4,500 per megawatt hour -- the equivalent of powering roughly 330 homes for one hour -- by Aug. 1. It's only June and already the electrical grid is being tested by record peak demand, prompting ... More >>

Politics of Misdirection: Dallas-based Luminant and Coalition of Utilities Blame the EPA for Coal's Creeping Demise

Dallas-based Luminant, the electricity generation arm of Energy Future Holdings, and a number of other utilities that own coal-fired fleets are attempting to head off an EPA rule that would curb the amount of nervous system-disrupting mercury, cancer-causing dioxin, arsenic and lead emitted from the ... More >>

Why Does TXU Want Texas to Raise the Price Cap on the Electricity it Buys?

Here's a question for all you MBAs in Unfair Park Land: Why would an independent retailer operating in a free, deregulated market want the state to take steps to suddenly raise the retailer's costs? For example, say you own a mom-and-pop store that sells tomatoes. The government suddenly wants to i ... More >>

Public Utility Commish Says We Don't Need To Make It Rain Cash To Keep the Lights On

Regulators are absolutely desperate to keep us away from that white-knuckle precipice of rolling blackouts we so perilously toed last summer. And they're willing to try anything to entice electric generators to build more power plants and bring existing plants out of mothballs in the meantime. The ... More >>

Economides: Texas Lost $7.7 Billion By Not Using Natural Gas To Keep Lights On

Dr. Michael Economides, author, CNBC regular and University of Houston professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, says Texas lost out on some $7.7 billion between 2005 and 2011 primarily because we didn't use natural gas for electricity. Economides, it should be noted, is a vocal industry ... More >>

PBS' 'Inside E Street' Takes On the Broken Promises of Electric Deregulation in Texas

Some 10 years ago, commodities and energy company Enron led a successful lobbying effort to deregulate Texas electricity markets. A free-market, we were told, would foster competition, keep power prices low and improve customer service. Yet over the last decade, none of these promises have been kept ... More >>

The Big Electricity Question: How Much Are Dry Nuts Worth?

As Brantley pointed out yesterday, the Texas Public Utility Commission got down to hard numbers last week as it inched further toward what appears to be inevitable -- a huge increase in the current $3,000 per megawatt-hour cap on the price of wholesale electricity during times when demand is high. T ... More >>

To Keep the Lights On, Texas Utility Regulators May Triple the Electricity Price Cap

The Texas Public Utility Commission is finally spitballing dollar figures for just how high they're willing to let wholesale electricity prices spiral when weather extremes send us to our thermostats. For the moment, we're sitting at $3,000 per megawatt-hour. To keep the lights from going out (ERCO ... More >>

Texas' Biggest Power Supplier Wants to Blame the EPA for Future Blackouts

At a Time When Texas Electricity Is Scarce, Does It Make Sense To Export It To Mexico?

A company that supplies electricity to Texans called American Electric Power filed to renew its application to export electricity to Mexico with the U.S. Department of Energy back in December. It operates a 720-megawatt coal-fired power plant near Vernon, and apparently it has been supplying our so ... More >>

ERCOT Says There Should Be Just Enough Juice To Keep Lights On This Summer, As Long As It Isn't Hot, Hot, Hotter Than Hell

Texas is in a tight spot. Electric supply simply isn't keeping up with consumer demand in a state bursting at the seams. By 2013, grid operator ERCOT predicts we won't have enough to cover peak demand, when we're all sweating and dashing for our thermostats. Summer 2012, on the other hand, will be ... More >>

The Market Speaks: Texas Coal-Fired Power Officially Unprofitable in January

Coal-fired power plants generated some 30 percent less electricity in January than they did during the same month in 2011 -- a huge drop for a a workhorse fleet that has historically fed this state's sprawling transmission system with a steady supply of baseload power since pretty much forever. Pro ... More >>

Dallas-Based Energy Future Holdings, Texas's Biggest Power Generator, Had a Rough Year

Energy Future Holdings' end-o'-year popped up on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's website late Tuesday, and, boy, is it ugly. Now, why should you care? Because Energy Future is the parent company of Luminant, Texas's biggest generator of electricity. And TXU Energy, a huge retail suppli ... More >>

ERCOT to City Council: Keeping the Lights On Means Sending the Right "Price Signals"

Council member Delia Jasso is officially disturbed by ERCOT's charts, particularly the bar graph showing a big gray empty space between the reserve margin we need to make sure the lights stay on during hot summer afternoons and the colored part that indicates how much generation capacity we'll actua ... More >>

Keeping the Lights On In Texas is Really Starting to Scare State Lawmakers

We watch a three-hour House State Affairs Committee hearing so you don't have to! Seriously, though, the future reliability of the Texas electrical grid is really starting to freak state legislators the fuck out. The watchword these days is "resource adequacy" -- bureaucrat-ese for "Remember those o ... More >>

Suit Alleges Texas Issued Luminant Unlimited License to Pollute Without Public Notice

Big Brown​This little nugget slipped past us last week -- somehow, it didn't make headlines north of Austin -- but it draws the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality into a legal tussle with the Sierra Club and the Environmental Integrity Project over pollution permits it issued to Dallas- ... More >>

Dueling Research: Fracked Shale Gas Worse For Climate Change Than Coal! Or, The Opposite!

In the rarefied halls of Cornell, the atmospheric-science equivalent of the gauntlet has been thrown. At stake is nothing less than the suitability of one of the most plentiful, domestically producible forms of energy in North America to replace a fuel speeding climate change and emitting tons of kn ... More >>

New Report Says That Texas May Struggle To Meet Peak Electric Demand By 2013

Get ready for more rolling blackouts, because according to a grid reliability report, Texas won't have the juice to meet peak demands by 2013. The study, authored by grid reliability enforcer North American Electric Reliability Corporation, says Texas operators may either bring old plants offline a ... More >>

Nothing Rapid About DART in Ice and Snow

​Check me on this. Dallas Area Rapid Transit, the outfit that runs the trains, didn't know how to keep their trains running in an ice storm. The same kind of trains operate in winter weather cities all over the world. There's a way to keep them running in an ice storm. But DART didn't know how. L ... More >>

Got Something to Say About Coal Ash Pollution? The EPA Wants to Hear From You Today.

Lower Colorado River AuthorityA new Sierra Club report says coal ash from Central Texas' Fayette Power Plant is polluting the groundwater nearby.​One month since the EPA's stolid road warriors blew threw Arlington to get your thoughts on pollution from gas drilling, the agency's making its triumph ... More >>

The T. Boone Pickens Alternative Energy Show Rolls Across America

Because Four Units Are Better Than Two

Laura Miller Ain't No One's Publicist

Is the Man Behind the TXU Deal a Hero or a Villain? Depends.

TXU, The Buyout and the Power of "Greenmail"

TXU Is All Coal-Fired-Up Over "Stop TXU" Ads. Surprising Much? Didn't Think So.

Parts Per Billion and Other Things You Really Oughta Care About If You Breathe

Micropower to the People!

Canary in a Coal Mine

Big Brown and Better Than Ever

More Inconvenient Truths

Coal Fired Up!

Best Thai Restaurant

Banana Leaf

Re-volting

Want cheaper electricity? Get out your calculator and call a lawyer.

Power Sharks

Texas consumer advocates worry that deregulation will spawn new ways to prey on the poor