Former EIA Administrator Appointed to Board of Directors
ERCOT said Wednesday that former U.S. Energy Information Administrator Linda Capuano has been appointed to its Board of Directors. Her appointment is effective Saturday.
Capuano fills the independent director’s position left vacant by Zin Smati, who resigned in December over a conflict of interest. (See ERCOT Board Member Resigns over Business Conflict.) She has been a faculty member of Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business since 2015, interrupted by her three-year stint at EIA from 2018 to 2021. Capuano also serves as an adviser to the school’s dean on energy initiatives.
She has also previously served on the boards of CAISO (2007-2010) and Peak Reliability (2013-2018). She has a doctorate in materials science and engineering from Stanford University and was a fellow in energy technology at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy from 2014 to 2018.
“Linda’s deep energy expertise will be of great value as we continue to strive towards industry-leading reliability and efficient markets,” ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas said in a press release.
Capuano will be joining a board under a new compensation structure approved Thursday by the Texas Public Utility Commission. The action increases the independent directors’ annual compensation from $87,000 to $160,000, an 83.9% increase. It is the first increase since 2011.
The ISO’s eight independent directors are appointed by the state’s three-person ERCOT Board Selection Committee, which comprises appointees from the governor, lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House of Representatives. The directors are required by law to not have fiduciary duty or assets in the ERCOT market and must be Texas residents.
Record Renewables Fill Gap
The Texas grid operator did not see a new high for peak demand Wednesday, but it did set a record for renewable energy production when wind and solar resources produced a combined 31.47 GW of power at 1:20 p.m. CT, according to Grid Status.
“[E]very megawatt helps,” Stoic Energy’s Doug Lewin tweeted, noting that 9.6 GW of thermal plants were offline at the time. ERCOT defines 8.3 GW as “high outages.”
ERCOT set an unofficial peak demand record Tuesday when it averaged 80.83 GW during the hour ending at 6 p.m. That would break the old mark of 80.15 GW set last July, the first time its demand was over 80 GW. (See related story, Under the Dome: ERCOT Sets Peak Demand Marks.)
The grid operator has averaged more than 80 GW during seven interval hours this week.
Gas Plant to Suspend Operations
Talen Energy notified ERCOT on Tuesday that it plans to indefinitely suspend operations at a gas-fired unit near Corpus Christi, Texas.
The company said Barney Davis Unit 1 will stop operating Nov. 24. The 49-year-old unit has a summer seasonal rating of 292 MW.
Also Tuesday, JX Nippon said that its Petra Nova carbon-capture facility near Houston will return to service July 15. It had been scheduled to return to operations Wednesday. The plant has been shut down since 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the face of slumping oil prices. (See Carbon-capture Plant Coming Back into Service.)
