The PUC's Priorities

In all of Texas government, there are few lists as consequential for everyday Texans as the PUC’s set of priorities. How the commissioners spend their time — and Texans’ money — will partially determine how much we pay for electricity and whether we’ll have power during life-threatening heat and cold.

A recent filing gives us some insight into how commissioners plan to spend the hectic upcoming year. Staff has laid out legislative deadlines and agency priorities through the end of 2024; it includes utility resilience plans, changes to the way reliability is defined, the creation of a new backup reserve service, continued electric market reforms, and more.

But it’s also critical to look at what’s not on the list. Three factors contribute most to rolling outages: extremely high demand, high gas and coal plant outages, and low clean energy output. If it’s just two of those, Texas is probably fine; if it’s all three, watch out. 

Of the three, the easiest, cheapest solutions, by far, work to reduce demand or make it more flexible when energy is tight. A new report from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) shows that building on existing programs, the PUC could reduce summer demand by 10-20% and winter demand by as much as 20-30%. 

But the PUC has done barely anything al all to tap into them. And even though electricity keeps getting tight in Texas — ERCOT issued a conservation call on Thursday and another on Sunday, and a third is likely to come later today — major demand-side policy is still not on the agenda.