News Analysis

 

And in Texas, all customer information flows through ERCOT.

Texas thinks it has the right formula for retail choice.

When queried on the wisdom of its restructuring plan relative to California's restructuring woes, Texas likes to point to the new generation capacity coming online, and a supply-demand balance much more favorable than California's.

But if you're looking for electric restructuring Texas-style, forget capacity; plenty of regions are siting new plants. Instead, look no further than the mundane topic of how customer data is exchanged among utilities and competitive retail suppliers, for no other state has taken the approach that Texas has embraced. After all, there is no single solution to making electric retail choice work, and the Lone Star State realizes the devil is in the details, such as switching processes, load profiles, the nuts and bolts of data exchange, and so on.

In actuality, however, it's not how customer data is exchanged (not much talk of EDI or XML in this article), but is handling that exchange of information. Unlike any other state, that "who" is the state's reliability council and independent system operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Unlike most states, where exchange of data such as customer load profiles is largely a function of the utility, Texas has created a more centralized system, wherein all such information passes directly through ERCOT.