Jim Albright, the Texas Reliability Entity’s CEO, drew on April’s mass outage in the Iberian Peninsula during the organization’s May 14 board meeting to highlight the importance of its work.
“I try to stress with staff every day that what we do is really critical to the world that we live in. When you see things like that happen, it really brings it back home,” he told board members. “It’s really important that we do the work that we do to mitigate the risks that are out there, as they talked about last week in the NERC board meeting.”
The outage lasted 18 hours and covered Portugal, Spain and parts of France. While a cause has yet to be determined, Spain’s grid operator has said the outages began with two separate generation losses.
NERC CEO Jim Robb said during the Board of Trustees’ May 8 meeting that the organization has offered to assist in the investigation. NERC staff will present findings on the outages at FERC’s June open meeting. (See NERC Offered to Help with Iberia Outage Investigation, Robb Says.)
“Even though we’re on separate continents, there’s going to be a lot that we can learn from it because we all share the same evolving resource mix that we’re all dealing with,” Albright said. “We all share the same risks, and we all need the same information to be able to be able to mitigate it.”
Albright noted the similarities with the Odessa disturbances of 2021 and 2022, when several renewable resources tripped offline. (See NERC Repeats IBR Warnings After Second Odessa Event.)
“I haven’t been told exactly what’s happened yet, but I do see some similarities to some of the things that we’ve seen here in our interconnection, so it’ll be interesting to see where it all goes,” he said.
Albright also gave the board a sneak preview of Texas RE’s Reliability Performance and Regional Risk Assessment, which will be released publicly in June.
A resource for ERCOT reliability information, the report finds an increasing risk from integrating large loads, reduced generator effects from cold weather and continued risk from inverter-based resources. It also looks at large loads’ effects on future reserve margins and the new challenge posed by artificial intelligence.
New Agreement with NERC
The board approved a new regional delegation agreement with NERC to continue serving as ERCOT’s regional entity. The agreement extends Texas RE’s ERO work until Dec. 31, 2030.
Texas RE General Counsel Derrick Davis said the discussion involved in the agreement was the “most robust” he has seen in two previous negotiations.
Board members also formally endorsed the 2026 business plan and budget, as presented to the Members Representatives Committee for its approval in April. The $21.598 million budget, which must be reviewed by NERC, is a $1.3 million increase (6.4%) over the 2025 budget; it adds three staffers to help handle the organization’s increasing workload and a 4% merit increase for personnel. (See Texas RE Endorses 6.4% Budget Increase for 2026.)
A clean audit of Texas RE’s 2024 financial statements also was approved by the board.
