News
LCG, September 30, 2025--Vistra Corp. announced yesterday that it will proceed with the next phase of its capital plan to support grid reliability in Texas. In 2024, Vistra identified over $1 billion worth of potential capital additions in generation capacity within the Texas ERCOT market by 2028 if market conditions were supportive. Now, with West Texas' growing power requirements, particularly the state's expanding oil and natural gas industries, Vistra reached a final investment decision and confirms it will build two new advanced natural gas-fired power units on-site at its Permian Basin Power Plant.
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LCG, September 24, 2025--Electric Reliability Council of Texas Inc. (ERCOT) yesterday announced its new initiative to increase its efforts to fully use and apply innovation and transformation through industry collaboration to best overcome the challenges and opportunities facing future grid operations. The new Grid Research, Innovation, and Transformation (GRIT) initiative will advance research and prototyping of emerging concepts and solutions to better understand the implications of rapid grid and technology evolution and position ERCOT to lead in the future energy landscape.
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Industry News
California Adopts Six-Month Plant Licensing Regulations
LCG, Nov. 16, 2000--The California Energy Commission yesterday voted unanimously to adopt emergency regulations for a new six-month power plant licensing process that will allow some power plants to be licensed and come on-line more quickly.Power projects that qualify for the speedy treatment are those which would have raised no eyebrows in the first place. In other words, the commission has done nothing to speed up the permitting of run-of-the-mill power plants which are the kind the state needs.A qualifying project will be one that could be licensed with a phone call.- It must meet all local, state and federal air quality rules including best available control technology requirements and have contracts for required air emission offsets.
- It must not cause adverse water impacts or require new appropriations of water. The commission said it will look kindly on projects that are air-cooled.
- It must be in full compliance with all land use requirements, including the general plans and zoning requirements of local government bodies.
- It must avoid "significant natural resource impacts," which means it cannot interfere with spotted owls, snail darters, rare wild mushrooms or the salt marsh mouse. I would help if it looked pretty, too.
- It must achieve efficient use of fuels.
- If you're a power plant developer and you can do all that you can get a permit in six months or maybe even sooner. But you will have to have already settled with local jurisdictions.
- All agencies will be required to provide their input within 100 days of when the commission accepts the application and the so-called "discovery" process much abused by anti-power plant activists will be held within "certain time frames," the commission said.
- If something goes wrong with a "fast track" application, the developer can move it to what the commission calls its "standard 12-month review process" without preparing a new application. Sometimes the 12-month process takes three years.
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UPLAN-NPM
The Locational Marginal Price Model (LMP) Network Power Model
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UPLAN-ACE
Day Ahead and Real Time Market Simulation
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UPLAN-G
The Gas Procurement and Competitive Analysis System
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PLATO
Database of Plants, Loads, Assets, Transmission...
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