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Legislative Issues

As with every legislative session, CAPP works to best represent the interest of its members. For the 2009 legislative session, CAPP identified priority issues to take before state lawmakers. These issues can be categorized into market power issues, ERCOT issues and Citizen Aggregation. An overview of these issues is given below.

For more information on CAPP’s legislative priorities, please contact Geoffrey Gay at (512) 322-5800.

MARKET POWER ISSUES

1. All generators, regardless of size, should explicitly be barred from the unlawful exercise of market power. Current regulations exempt smaller generators from market power prohibitions.

2. Entities harmed by wholesale market abuse – such as municipalities, commercial customers or retail electric providers – should be given explicit standing to participate in enforcement actions brought by the Public Utility Commission (PUC). Affected parties are currently barred from participating in such proceedings.

3. Ownership and control of generation capacity should be limited to no more than 20 percent of total generation capacity within the functional market (ERCOT zone) in order to enhance competition and mitigate market power and the ability of any one generator to affect prices. In the alternative, the PUC should be directed to create a single ERCOT-wide market with uniform congestion pricing.

ERCOT

Direct ERCOT, the organization that administers the state power grid, to abandon all efforts to transition to a nodal market and direct the PUC to open a proceeding to consider other market design options.

CITIZEN AGGREGATION

Permit cities to create and implement opt-out citizen aggregation programs, or alternatively to become Retail Electric Providers or Municipally Owned Utilities.