EnergyOnline
Services

RSS FEED

EnergyOnline.com rss

News

Vistra to Install New Gas-Fired Units at Permian Basin Power Plant

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.

Read more

ERCOT Announces New Grid Research, Innovation and Transformation (GRIT) Initiative

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.

Read more

Industry News

Another Seattle Electric Rate Increase - More to Come

LCG, May 31, 2001Customers of Seattle City Light, the Washington city's municipal utility, will begin paying 9.3 percent more for electricity in July. The rate hike, the third so far this year, won't be the last, according to the Seattle Times, and also won't be the stiffest.

The paper said yesterday that this latest increase, like previous increases of 10 percent in January and 18 percent in March, is considered a temporary surcharge, expected to be removed in 2002 or 2003.

The rate increase is needed to pay for power at ever-increasing rates and to repay $250 million the utility has borrowed to pay higher than expected prices for power already purchased. City Light typically purchases between 10 percent and 15 percent of its power on the wholesale market, where a persistent drought in the hydroelectric-dependent Pacific Northwest has caused prices to increase 10- to 20-fold.

Even with the current rate increase, a residential customer in Seattle pays only 6 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, but he's used to paying a lot less because of all the federal hydroelectric dams that dot the Columbia and Snake Rivers. The water flow this year is expected to be about 58 percent of normal, which means there will be only 58 percent of the usual amount of power.

Most of those dams are operated by the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency. Next month, City Light expects to learn how much the agency will charge for a new power contract.

According to Gary Zarker, City Light customers could face a 22 percent rate increase in October, and that's under a best-case scenario. If Bonneville fails to get its municipal utility customers to rein in power usage, and get several aluminum companies to halt production, the rate increase to Seattle customers could be much higher than 22 percent, he said.

Copyright © 2025 LCG Consulting. All rights reserved. Terms and Copyright
UPLAN-NPM
The Locational Marginal Price Model (LMP) Network Power Model
Uniform Storage Model
A Battery Simulation Model
UPLAN-ACE
Day Ahead and Real Time Market Simulation
UPLAN-G
The Gas Procurement and Competitive Analysis System
PLATO
Database of Plants, Loads, Assets, Transmission...
CAISO CRR Auctions
Monthly Price and Congestion Forecasting Service