The Texas Public Utility Commission said March 11 that Jeff McDonald, a 22-year market monitoring veteran, has been hired as director of ERCOT’s Independent Market Monitor.
He replaces Carrie Bivens, who resigned as the IMM’s director last year.
McDonald spent nearly eight years at ISO-NE as its vice president of market monitoring. Before that, he held several managerial positions during 14 years with CAISO’s Department of Market Monitoring.
He will be responsible for collaborating with the PUC to detect and prevent market manipulation and identify potential design improvements for the ERCOT market, the commission said.
“Jeff’s deep expertise and decades of experience make him the perfect person to lead the IMM team in Texas and ensure the market is operating efficiently, fairly and competitively,” Potomac Economics President David Patton said in a statement.
Potomac Economics has served as ERCOT’s IMM since 2005, when the organization was created. It recently was awarded another contract to monitor the market through 2027.
Bivens resigned in November after 3.5 years as the IMM’s director following several disagreements with PUC and ERCOT leadership. She cast doubt on the performance credit mechanism pushed by former PUC chair Peter Lake and defended before the ERCOT board an IMM report that said the grid operator’s newest ancillary service “likely” raised the real-time market’s energy value by at least $8 billion. (See Bivens Resigns as ERCOT’s Market Monitor.)
McDonald joins Potomac Economics from Concentric Energy Advisors, where he was the firm’s vice president. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Davis, a master’s in natural resource economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a bachelor’s in agricultural and managerial economics from Cal Davis.
