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The Public Utility Commission on Thursday shelved the performance credit mechanism, a controversial idea that was designed to bring more power onto the state grid and increase its reliability.
“I don’t believe that the PCM, as currently designed, will provide the reliability benefits needed in the ERCOT market,” PUC Chair Thomas Gleeson wrote in a Dec. 18 memo that the rest of the commission endorsed on Thursday.
The performance credit mechanism represented a complex change to the way Texas’ electricity market works.
The idea would have required electricity providers — the companies, co-ops and municipal utilities that sell power to people — to pay more to generators that committed to having electricity available when grid conditions get tight. Electricity providers then could have passed those extra costs onto consumers.
The goal was to incentivize companies to build more of what are known as dispatchable power facilities. Dispatchable power sources, such as natural gas, nuclear and coal-fired plants, can turn on any time and fill in the gaps in supply when demand for power is high — unlike renewable sources that depend on sun and wind.