“Government increased the cost of Texas electricity by $20 Billion in 2023.”
On July 1, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced that they “will seek to expand the [Texas Energy Fund] to $10 billion to build more new [generation] plants as soon as possible.” The Texas Legislature, with voter approval, created the Fund last year with initial funding of $5 billion.
Subsidizing multi-billion dollar generators and electric utilities using Texans’ money is nothing new in Texas. Figure 1 shows that in 2023 the U.S. government, Texas’ state government, and Texas local governments increased the cost of electricity in the Texas area served by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) by $19.9 billion, most of it by providing subsidies and benefits to generators and transmission companies. This represented 42.7% of the total cost of electricity to Texans in ERCOT.…
Editor’s Note: The following concludes a three-part series by the Energy Alliance, a project of the Texas Business Coalition, examining how the Public Utility Commission of Texas has violated consumer choice and market forces in the Texas electric market. Part I was Storm Uri: The PUCT’s $26 billion Electricity Tax and Part II: Texas Defeats Electric Competition.
“The lack of investment in reliable and dispatchable sources of generation in ERCOT has already led to a decline in the reliability of the grid…. Further declines in generation from dispatchable sources will further increase prices for Texas consumers—on top of whatever price hikes the PUC may have planned for them.”
At stake in this case is whether Texans might experience some relief from the billions of dollars from the tax that have been passed on to them in the form of higher monthly electricity bills.…
Editor’s Note: The following is the second in a three-part series by the Energy Alliance, a project of the Texas Business Coalition, examining how the Public Utility Commission of Texas has violated consumer choice and market forces in the Texas electric market. Yesterday’s post, Storm Uri: The PUCT’s $26 billion Electricity Tax.
On January 30, the Texas Supreme Court will hold a hearing to determine whether the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) violated the Texas Legislature’s instructions that “electric services and their prices should be determined by customer choices and the normal forces of competition” when it arbitrarily set the price of electricity at $9,000 per megawatt hour during Winter Storm Uri. The Texas Third Court of Appeals has already determined the PUC’s action to be illegal.…