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News
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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 Utilities Tottering on Brink of Bankruptcy
LCG, Dec. 14, 2000--California's two largest utilities acknowledged yesterday that they are flirting with bankruptcy and may soon not have enough money to pay for electricity which they deliver to their retail distribution customers."We continue to have the ability to make power purchases on behalf of our customers," said Pacific Gas & Electric Co. spokesman Ron Low. "But we cannot go on indefinitely borrowing money topay for our customers' electricity."PG&E and Southern California Edison Co. are now in an $8 billion hole that gets deeper every day as the two companies are forced to pay market prices for power which they deliver to customers protected by rates frozen at a level 10 percent lower than they were paying in 1997.So far in December, electricity prices have averaged about $330 per megawatt-hour, with a spike yesterday to $1,407 on the spot market. PG&E has since May paid around $4.6 billion more for power than it has collected from its customers. For SoCal Ed the figure is some $3.5 billion.As a part of electric deregulation in California, the state's three investor-owned utilities (San Diego Gas & Electric Co. is the third) sold off their non-nuclear power plants. They were also enjoined by the state's restructuring law from entering into long-term power purchase agreements with the companies that bought their plants, and forced to purchase all of their power through a quasi-public agency, the California Power Exchange.Yesterday, some operators of the state's power plants were declining to sell electricity to PG&E or SoCal Ed unless they received cash on the barrel head, a sure sign the power producers are worried about the possibility of bankruptcy.Financial markets are beginning to take notice of the financial plight of the utilities, with Standard & Poor's placing both PG&E and SoCal Ed on its credit watch with "negative implications." But S&P said it expected that the two companies would eventually be allowed to collect most of their power costs from customers.
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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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