ERCOT stakeholders have endorsed a protocol change (NPRR1229) that creates a process to compensate market participants when a constrained management plan or ERCOT-directed switching instruction trips a generator that otherwise would have stayed online.

The revision request passed over objections from consumer groups during the Technical Advisory Committee’s April 23 meeting. They said the NPRR shifts costs and deviates from previous market rules for the direct assignment of congestion costs.

“The whole point is that parties are supposed to deal with the direct assignment of congestion costs,” said Lyondell Chemical’s Eric Schubert, one of the Consumer segment’s six members who all voted against the measure. “In other words, you’re supposed to have a backstop in case something comes up online, the generator trips. … It seems to us that this is a problematic NPRR and continues down the path of socializing costs that should be directly assigned.”

The Lower Colorado River Authority’s Blake Holt said the need for compensation will be “extremely rare.”

“When a resource is instructed to operate in a risky condition to benefit the grid reliably and is subsequently tripped offline, we believe it is reasonable to cover the cost of the trip,” he said. “There’s going to be lots of rigor in approving a dispute.”

The proposed change passed 20-8, with one abstention. Electric retailers Rhythm Ops and Demand Control 2 joined the Consumer segment in voting against the measure.

TAC also discussed NPRR1275 but took no action on it. The protocol change, tabled at the Protocol Revision Subcommittee, would expand the qualifying pipeline definition for firm fuel supply service (FFSS) by including contractual natural gas storage in addition to on-site fuel storage.

FFSS was created by the Texas Legislature in 2021 after Winter Storm Uri nearly brought the ERCOT grid to its knees. Renewable resources took much of the blame in Texas, but FERC and NERC found the greatest share of fuel outages during the storm occurred among natural gas facilities. (See FERC, NERC Release Final Texas Storm Report.)

The Public Utility Commission also has a docket (56000) on FFSS. The commission agreed with staff’s recommendation during its April 24 open meeting to delay FFSS’ first procurement until the 2026/27 winter season.

Large Load Working Group OK’d

TAC agreed to sunset the Large Flexible Load Task Force and approved a charter that transitions the body into the Large Load Working Group, reporting to the committee. Members placed the motion on TAC’s combination ballot, which passes for its consent agenda.

The task force’s leadership asked for the changes during the committee’s March meeting. The working group will be responsible for developing and recommending policies to facilitate the “reliable and efficient integration” of large loads into the ERCOT system. (See “Large Load Task Force to Remove ‘Flexible,’” ERCOT Technical Advisory Committee Briefs: March 26, 2025.)

“There’s enough activity going on with all the large loads that we don’t see an end to the task force. There’s a lot of activities that will probably be operations focused,” said ERCOT’s Bill Blevins, who chaired the task force.

Blevins said the group will return to TAC’s May meeting with nominations for its leadership.

The working group is open to ERCOT stakeholders and representatives from the Public Utility Commission, the Independent Market Monitor, the Office of Public Utility Counsel and the grid operator’s staff. It will address interconnection study processes and modeling requirements for large loads (75 MW and above) along with standalone considerations and issues related to co-locating the loads with on-site generation or other resources.

Staff told members that new standalone and co-located projects, as well as several project cancellations, resulted in a net increase of more than 25 GW in the large-load queue, as of March. The queue contains more than 136 GW of study requests, but a little more than 4.5 GW have been energized since 2022.

TAC Endorses $119M Oncor Project

TAC members endorsed a $119 million, 138-kV project in West Texas by placing it on the combo ballot. The Oncor project entails upgrading a 29-mile transmission line and updating other facilities and infrastructure to address reliability issues.

ERCOT’s Regional Planning Group selected the project’s route from among two other alternatives. One option came in at $247 million and the other at $81 million. With the cost exceeding $1 million, the grid operator’s staff must bring the project to the Board of Directors for final approval.

Oncor expects to finish the project by December. As an upgrade, it does not require a certificate of convenience and necessity.

The combo ballot also included the approval of strategic objectives for TAC’s Protocol Revision and Reliability and Operations subcommittees, and an NPRR and a system change request (SCR) that, pending board approval, would:

• • NPRR1271: allow Mexico’s state-owned electric utility, Comision Federal de Electricidad (CFE), to opt out of a requirement to designate a user security administrator and receive digital certificates. CFE is registered with ERCOT as a transmission and/or distribution service provider, a load-serving entity and a resource entity.
  • SCR830: implement a machine-to-machine client credentials authentication flow using OAuth 2.0, allowing for certain read-only endpoints of the GINR Rest Application Programming Interface to be exposed for authorized use.