The Texas Public Utility Commission on Monday announced that a new chairman and second independent director have been selected for ERCOT’s Board of Directors, replacing the eight market segment representatives sitting on the board.
The PUC said in a release that the ERCOT Board Selection Committee had chosen Paul Foster, president of Franklin Management and founder of Western Refining, as the board’s chair and Carlos Aguilar, CEO of Texas Central Partners, as the first two directors for ERCOT’s new board.
Foster and Aguilar will join PUC Chair Peter Lake, interim ERCOT CEO Brad Jones and the Office of Public Utility Counsel’s Chris Ekoh on the board. Lake is a non-voting member, as will be ERCOT’s CEO.
The PUC said the board’s composition meets the requirements of Senate Bill 2, which replaced the five independent directors and eight market segment representatives with eight independent directors chosen by a selection committee appointed by Texas’ political leadership.
The two directors will give the board a quorum and allow it to meet Tuesday morning without the previous directors to consider ERCOT’s request for an expedited approval of amended bylaws to comply with SB2.
The PUC release quotes the commission and ERCOT’s leadership with expressing “their gratitude to the outgoing board members for their service to Texas.”
SB2 requires each board member to be a Texas resident with executive-level experience in finance, business, engineering, trading, risk management, law or electric market design. When the February winter storm nearly brought the ERCOT system to total collapse in February, Texans frustrated with the ensuing long-term outages directed their ire toward the six board members who lived outside the state. (See ERCOT Chair, 4 Directors to Resign.)
The remaining six board members are expected to be named in the coming months. The selection committee is working with a search firm to find the directors. (See Search Firm Chosen to Find New ERCOT Board Members.)
Foster has previously chaired the University of Texas System Board of Regents and been a member of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the University of Texas System Lands Advisory Board and the El Paso Branch of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank.
Aguilar has a background in global businesses and public-private development projects; his company is working to develop a high-speed train between North Texas and the Houston area. He has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Duke University and a doctorate in technological economics from the University of Stirling in Scotland.
“We welcome these highly qualified leaders, their expertise and insights into our relentless pursuit of grid reliability,” Jones said in a statement.
