Interim ERCOT CEO Brad Jones | © RTO Insider LLC

DALLAS — Brad Jones, ERCOT’s interim CEO, opened his conversation Friday with the Dallas Friday Club as he always does on what he calls his Listening Tour: stepping away from the podium and eschewing the use of a mic. The better to wander the stage and connect with his audience.

“This will take about two and a half hours,” Jones said, drawing a few laughs.

His story began on Feb. 15 during a winter storm, “one you’ve never seen and one your grandparents never saw.” Jones, retired from the electric industry at the time, says he was on his couch and watching television coverage of the winter storm disaster that left millions without power and caused human and financial suffering.

“Things have changed for me, haven’t they?” Jones said in a quick aside.

“Were you in Texas?” asked a voice from the back of the room.

“Yes.”

“Did you have power?”

“Electricity, but no water.”

It’s that mixture of charm, humor and candor that serves Jones well as he explains to Texans what happened to the grid during the storm and why it won’t happen again. Several members of the public affairs organization exchanged smirks as Jones began his comments. An hour later, most everyone in the room was listening in rapt attention.

Jones admitted to ERCOT’s poor communication during the storm, when “each piece of the market was telling different stories.” He said the subfreezing temperatures shut down almost 50 GW of the grid operator’s capacity — more than the 48-GW demand peaks CAISO sees on its hottest days, he said — and left the grid within about 10 minutes or so of a black start situation when generators automatically shut down.

“Things would have been much more difficult to manage,” Jones said.

He explained the lack of interconnections with neighboring RTOs wouldn’t have helped much, as they were experiencing the same emergency conditions. That led into an explanation of why ERCOT, “an island to itself,” is exempt from FERC jurisdiction.

When Jones began taking questions from the audience, he was asked how Texas can again say it has the best grid in the nation. He said his flippant answer is that New York has had three blackouts and California two while the Lone Star State has not had one.

“The real answer is simple,” he said. “We have to show the country we’ve changed the way we operate.”

Jones mentioned the RACE acronym he uses to denote “reliable, affordable, clean electricity.” Until the February storm, he said, RACE had been turned into CARE.

“For 20 years, we let the market dictate what we need for reliability,” Jones said. “We need to move reliability back to the front. That will be how we change.”

Jones handled every following question with similar ease. When the luncheon concluded, he took time to visit with the diners that stayed behind before doing on-camera interviews with the local media.

Asked if he is the perfect spokesman for this role as the communicator in chief, Jones laughed loudly.

“It’s an extremely important role,” he said. “The reason I came back to ERCOT after the winter storm was so ERCOT can begin to restore confidence among Texans in what it does.”

Jones served as ERCOT’s COO before leaving to take the top job at NYISO. He has watched the industry from afar since abruptly leaving New York for personal reasons in 2018. (See Brad Jones out at NYISO.)

The Brad Jones Listening Tour continues. Dallas was the 13th stop, with four more on the schedule. That is expected to change, however. Jones has yet to come across a city council or town hall that he won’t attend.

Contrast that with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has guaranteed the grid will not fail this winter. While Jones has been crisscrossing the state, Abbott held a closed-door meeting Thursday with “Texas energy providers” to discuss the grid’s reliability and “preparedness ahead of the winter season.”

The governor’s office said in a statement that Abbott and “energy leaders” discussed actions already taken and improvements made by both the providers and the state, including updated winter preparedness plans, meetings with plant managers and “winterization of all components of the power grid.”

The office also said several providers “discussed their efforts to ensure that natural gas supply is available this winter to fuel power plants, including on-site storage of natural gas and designation of natural gas facilities as critical to ensure they maintain power during energy emergencies.”

NRG Energy (NYSE:NRG), Vistra (NYSE:VST), Calpine and several pipeline companies were among those involved in the meeting.

434 MW Back for Late Winter

ERCOT will have an additional 434 MW of gas-fired capacity to play with before this winter is over, thanks to a pair of decisions related to retired power plants.

Vistra told the grid operator on Friday it is bringing its 69-MW Wharton County Generation facility out of retirement and making it operational as of Feb. 4. The plant, located southwest of Houston, was decommissioned and retired last December after a forced outage. (See “Luminant, 1 Other File NSOs with ERCOT,” Vistra to Shut down Another Texas Coal Plant.)

ERCOT and CenterPoint Energy, the interconnecting transmission service provider, may delay the proposed return date if any studies, testing, metering or facility upgrades are necessary.

NRG notified ERCOT on Dec. 14 that Gregory Power Partners — a three-unit, 365-MW facility near Corpus Christi currently under seasonal mothball status — will change the start date of the operating period from May 1 to Jan. 1.

The plant was shut down in late 2016 when its cogeneration partner, Sherwin Alumina, filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations. NRG returned it to seasonal operations in 2019. (See ERCOT Approves Seasonal Plan for NRG Cogen Units.)

The announcements will help make up for the loss of almost 500 MW of capacity following recent suspension-of-operations notifications filed by the cities of Austin and Garland for aging gas-fired generators. ERCOT approved the notices earlier this month. (See “500 MW to Depart Market,” ERCOT Briefs: Week of Nov. 1, 2021.)

The 405-MW Austin unit will be available through the winter before being retired.