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Greenflash Infrastructure Closes Transaction for ERCOT's Largest Battery Storage Project Under Construction

LCG, October 7, 2025--Greenflash Infrastructure, L.P. ("Greenflash") today announced that it has successfully closed a hybrid tax capital and debt financing for Project Soho - a 400MW / 800MWh standalone battery storage project in Texas.

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FERC Approves Vistra's Plan to Acquire Nearly 2,600 MW of Gas-fired Power Plants

LCG, October 6, 2025--Vistra today announced that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved Vistra's acquisition of certain subsidiaries owning seven natural gas generation facilities from Lotus Infrastructure Partners. The acquisition was announced last May, and Vistra expects the transaction to close this quarter or during the first quarter of 2026. Vistra's acquisition remains subject to approval by the New York Public Service Commission and other customary closing conditions.

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Industry News

Transactions by Enron Made Through Small Utilities

LCG, June 6, 2002--In testimony before California state senators yesterday, consultant Robert McCullough, of Portland, Oregon, said that Enron used trades with members of the Northern California Power Agency to evade regulatory detection of manipulative trading strategies.

McCullough said the NCPA was only one of various trading partners used by Enron to create the illusion of impending congestion on the California transmission grid. The agency's members include 23 public utilities, many of which rely on the NCPA for electric power services. "All told, Enron's schemes included a number of other parties, selected for their transmission access, location and ability to obscure regulatory review," McCullough told a panel investigating the blackouts that took place in 2001. The Independent System Operator ordered rolling blackouts of different areas of the state in order to prevent a system-wide collapse.

John Fistolera, the NCPA's legislative director, said, "As far as we knew, the movement of generation over those lines was to the benefit of the statewide grid." A sales division manager, Larry Owens of Silicon Valley Power, based in Santa Clara, said Silicon Valley Power had not utilized the wholesale services provided by the NCPA. Palo Alto's spokeswoman, Linda Clerkson, said the municipal utility had no comment, when contacted by the Sacramento Bee.

The appearance of congestion could have been used to the advantage of traders, because of a rule imposed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that required payments to energy providers for not loading lines with their generation. The ISO asked that the rule be dropped.

"The schemes appear to be simple comercial fraud since, by design, no actual generation was ever envisaged as running to support the schedules filed with the ISO. Stripped of their complexities, these schemes are simply a modern form of check kiting," McCullough testified. The ISO, which would receive allegedly fraudulent schedules of generation and demand, would attempt to curtail transactions or preserve reliability for most of the state by imposing rolling blackouts.

According to Frank Wolak, an economist at Stanford University quoted in the Sacramento Bee, despite what he termed "just standard trading strategies," the ability of generators to withhold power from the grid could cause more serious reliability problems as well as spiraling prices.
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