Wholesale summer power prices in Texas are expected to rise after the shutdown of three coal-fired power plants last year. But by how much — and what kind of impact those increases will have on electricity bills — might not be known until the summer is over, regulators say.
“We are going into a summer where people are going to be paying a lot, potentially paying a lot more,” said Commissioner Brandy Marty Marquez, who serves on the state’s Public Utility Commission. “We are not really sure what we are going to see.”
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees 90 percent of the state’s power grid, expects that it will lose more than 7,000 megawatts of power capacity by this summer. (One megawatt is enough to power 200 homes on a hot Texas day.) Much of that power, around 4,000 megawatts, comes from the loss of three of the state’s largest coal-fired power plants.