HOUSTON — Bill Magness, the former head of the Texas power grid, testified in court Wednesday during a bankruptcy trial for Waco-based electric co-op Brazos Electric.
The Ex-ERCOT chief said he was following Gov. Greg Abbott's lead in running up billions of dollars in electric bills, according to a Houston Chroniclearticle.
As power plants were starting come back online, Magness said former Public Utility Commissioner Chairman DeAnn Walkertold him Abbott wanted them to do whatever necessary to prevent further rotating blackouts that left millions of Texans without power.
“She told me the governor had conveyed to her if we emerged from rotating outages it was imperative they not resume,” Magness testified. “We needed to do what we needed to do to make it happen.”
Charges were up to $9,000 per megawatt hour – more than 150 times normal prices.
Last year, a spokesperson for the governor told the Houston Chronicle Abbott wasn't
“involved in any way.”
Brazos says they have up to a $1.9 billion power bill from ERCOT that forced them into bankruptcy.
“It did nothing at all to cause more generation to come online,” said Lino Mendiola, one of the attorneys representing Brazos. “It was an attempted remedy that didn’t solve any of the problems caused by the winter storm.”
The Houston Chronicle article says he explained how Walker had come to ERCOT's operations center during the crisis and told him Abbott's demand to end rotating blackouts.
Magness said he believed it was a risk, explaining even as powerplants were starting to come back online on Feb. 17, 2021, the system was far from secure.
