Keynoting the Texas Reliability Entity’s December board meeting, ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas touted the grid operator’s development of a new reliability standard for the market as “one of [our] more significant” accomplishments. 

He said rather than focus on an outage event’s frequency risk — the loss-of-load expectation, generally set at once every 10 years — as do other grid operators, ERCOT’s reliability standard will measure frequency (one in 10), duration (no more than 12 hours in any event) and magnitude. 

“When you couple or put together all three of those pieces and parts, you have a comprehensive reliability standard that better characterizes what the real risk probabilities are of a grid event and what the impact characteristics would be to consumers in the region,” Vegas told the Texas RE Board of Directors on Dec. 11. 

ERCOT staff are finalizing the magnitude element and working on the various parameters and scenario modeling for the new standard, Vegas said. 

“We want to set it at a level where it’s reasonable to rotate outages should you get into that scenario, so that people who experience a grid-related outage would not have an elongated, continuous outage, but rather would have the opportunity to have power restored as those rotating outages move through different customer groups,” he said. 

The Public Utility Commission approved the reliability standard’s framework in August. Criteria deficiencies are to be assessed at least once every three years, beginning in 2026. The PUC will approve the modeling assumptions and include a public review before the assessment begins. ERCOT is required to develop market design options that address the expected deficiencies.  

“The way this is going to be used effectively, we’re going to now have a yardstick that is going to effectively help us measure how we think the ERCOT market will perform in some period of time,” Vegas said. “I’m really excited to have the first really formal reliability standard in the ERCOT market with the completion of this work.” 

Vegas also briefed the Texas RE on the “remarkable load growth trajectory” ERCOT expects over the next five to 10 years — an additional 65 to 150 GW by 2030 — that could grow the oil-rich West Texas load zone to nearly the size of Houston, the nation’s fourth-most populous city. AI data centers, crypto miners and other large loads have accounted for about 63 GW seeking interconnection to the grid, he said. 

In response, ERCOT is considering 765-kV transmission backbones and trying to add smaller infrastructure as quickly as possible. The continued wave of energy storage and solar facilities is useful in meeting demand during tight periods and providing ancillary services. 

Alluding to the energy transition and thanking Vegas for his presentation, board Chair Jeff Corbett said, “All those of us in this world, we’re reading this every day, but when you come and talk about it, you put it in a nice package that allows us to actually take a step back and go, ‘Crap!’ 

“But I will say that I do sleep OK at night because Pablo is at ERCOT.” 

In other business: 

• • The board endorsed the Nominating Committee’s recommendation that Corbett continue to serve as chair and Suzanne Spaulding as vice chair in 2025.  

• • The Texas RE’s membership has dropped from 125 members to 107. Generation resources account for the bulk of the entity’s members, with 74.