ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas told his Board during a planning session this week that his agency will abandon a plan to relieve congestion on a key transmission line due to lack of customer response. Vegas said Tuesday that a planned conservation program has failed to attract significant commitments from big power consumers.

“The contract for capacity that was issued to support summer conditions resulted in a very low submission,” he told the ERCOT board. “It’s clear … we need to modify the approach for developing the next set of demand response capabilities in the ERCOT market.”

The issue at hand high-capacity transmission line designed to carry electricity generated by South Texas wind installations hundreds of miles north to the Dallas/Fort Worth market. During mid-day periods of high demand last summer, the line became congested with too much input, causing ERCOT to have to issue conservation warnings on as many as 11 days in August. The agency’s plan to address that issue was to solicit applications for voluntary conservation by major power users near the congestion point in South Texas for 500 MW of consumption, but the solicitation for bids attracted only three applications, all of which were for less than 10 MW.

Two Critical Grid Weak Spots

The failure of the plan – and the need to devise it to begin with – highlights a pair of key weaknesses in the Texas grid as currently constructed:

• The fact that the construction of new thermal generation capacity in high-demand regions like the DFW market has failed to keep pace with demand growth; and
• The heavy reliance on costly transmission lines to move power generated by wind or solar industrial sites hundreds of miles to those demand centers.

Where wind is concerned, the problem in the state is that the only regions truly fit to host the big industrial sites are in the West Texas/Panhandle region and in deep South Texas, where populations are sparse. Over the first decade of this century, Texas spent $7 billion to build high-capacity transmission lines called the CREZ lines to carry wind-generated power from West Texas to the Houston and DFW markets. That final tab was 700% bigger than initial estimates provided by wind developers. Additional transmission has had to be added along with the more recent build-out of wind generation in South Texas.

The obsession by the state’s policymakers and regulators to pack the grid with intermittent and often unpredictable wind and solar at the expense of encouraging the installation of additional thermal or nuclear capacity has resulted in an increasingly unstable grid that requires ERCOT to often invoke novel plans like this one. It didn’t get a lot of news coverage, but this past winter, ERCOT even resorted to the extreme measure of trying to convince owners of mothballed coal-fired generation plants to reopen them as part of a plan to avoid blackouts during a major winter storm event.

Help Is On The Way

San Antonio-based CPS is currently in the process of upgrading the transmission line that caused the near-crisis situations last summer, but the anticipated completion date of that project is still three years away. As I reported here last week, help in the arena of new thermal capacity is also on the way after the new Texas Energy Fund to incentivize development of more natural gas generation attracted an overwhelming response from generation companies. But those projects will also take years to plan and build.

Looking out farther into the future, help could also be on the way in the form of modular nuclear power, after Dallas-based Natura Resources received the good news from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that a construction permit for its planned molten salt reactor to be sited on the campus of Abilene Christian University (ACU) will be approved in September.

In a recent interview, Natura CEO Doug Robison told me the project, which is a demonstration project developed in conjunction with ACU, the University of Texas, Texas A&M University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology, has an anticipated startup date in 2027. The eventual success of that project could spur development of an array of such modular reactors – Robison says the reactor itself is roughly the size of a home refrigerator – that have the advantage of being installed in the middle of major demand centers rather than hundreds of miles distant.

The Bottom Line

Unfortunately, while this set of prospects for a more stable grid to come remain years away from reality, Mr. Vegas and his grid managers and planners at ERCOT will continue to have to devise novel ways to keep power flowing to a rapidly growing array of big demand centers. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

There will be a new Men’s College World Series champion.

The Tennessee Volunteers and the Texas A&M Aggies will face off in the 2024 Men’s College World Series championship, a best-of-three series that begins Saturday. Both SEC powerhouses are looking for their first NCAA Tournament championship in school history.

Both Tennessee and Texas A&M went undefeated (3-0) in the round-robin and punched their tickets to the championship series by way of impressive wins – Tennessee downed Florida State 7-2 on Wednesday, while Texas A&M defeated Florida 6-0.

Tennessee and Texas A&M did not play each other during the regular season, but the two squads did face off during the SEC tournament in late May. Tennessee defeated the Aggies 7-4 en route to the SEC tournament title. But who will have the edge in the championship series?

Here’s everything you need to know about the championship series and how each team got here:

When is the College World Series championship?

The best-of-three championship series kicks off Saturday. Here’s the full schedule:

• June 22: MCWS Final Game 1, 7:30 p.m. ET | ESPN
• June 23: MCWS Final Game 2, 2 p.m. ET | ABC
• June 24: MCWS Final Game 3 (if necessary), 7 p.m. ET | ESPN

How did Tennessee get to College World Series finals?

Tennessee baseball advanced to the championship series for the first time since 1951. The Vols are vying for their first NCAA Tournament championship. Here’s how they got to the championship series:

Regionals

• May 31: Tennessee 9, Northern Kentucky 3
• June 1: Tennessee 12, Indiana 6
• June 2: Tennessee 12, Southern Miss 3

Super Regionals

The Volunteers advanced to their fourth straight Super Regional:

• June 7: Tennessee 11, Evansville 6
• June 8: Evansville 10, Tennessee 8
• June 9: Tennessee 12, Evansville 1

Men’s College World Series

The Volunteers moved on to the Men’s College World Series for third time in four years:

• June 14: Tennessee 12, Florida State 11
• June 16: Tennessee 6, North Carolina 1
• June 19: Tennessee 7, Florida State 2

How did Texas A&M get to College World Series finals?

Texas A&M baseball is in pursuit of its first NCAA Tournament championship and will make its first appearance in the championship series this weekend. It is 8-0 in the tournament so far.

Here’s the Aggies’ path to the championship series:

Regionals

• May 31: Texas A&M 8, Grambling 0
• June 1: Texas A&M 4, Texas 2 (11 innings)
• June 2: Texas A&M 9, Louisiana 4

Super Regionals

Texas A&M baseball reached the super regional for the 11th time in school history:

• June 8: Texas A&M 10, Oregon 6
• June 9: Texas A&M 15, Oregon 9

Men’s College World Series

The Aggies moved on to their eighth CWS appearance:

• June 15: Texas A&M 3, Florida 2
• June 17: Texas A&M 5, Kentucky 1
• June 19: Texas A&M 6, Florida 0

The action comes after The Texas Tribune reported that influencers were being paid to defend impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton.

AUSTIN (Texas Tribune) — Texas’ top campaign finance watchdog voted Tuesday to require social media figures to disclose when they are paid for political advertisement, nearly a year after The Texas Tribune reported that influencers were being quietly paid to defend impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In a 7-0 vote, the Texas Ethics Commission gave final approval to the changes, which were first proposed in March.

Last summer, the Tribune reported on a new company, Influenceable, that was paying Gen Z influencers to create or share social media posts that attacked the impeachment process and the Texas Republicans leading it, including House Speaker Dade Phelan. Commissioners did not mention the company directly on Tuesday but said at their previous meeting that the changes were in response to “at least one business” that was paying social media figures for undisclosed political messaging.

Influenceable has a partnership with Campaign Nucleus, a digital campaign service that was founded by Brad Parscale, a top official on former President Donald Trump’s last two campaigns. It also received $18,000 from Defend Texas Liberty in May 2023, after which influencers began to parrot claims that Paxton was the victim of a political witch hunt, accuse Phelan of being a drunk or urge their millions of collective followers to come to Paxton’s aid.

Defend Texas Liberty is a political action committee that two West Texas oil billionaires, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, used to give more than $15 million to far-right campaigns and candidates in the state since 2021. The two are by far Paxton’s biggest donors.

The new change amends the commission’s rules to clarify that disclosures are required for those who are paid more than $100 to post or repost political advertisements.

“This is not the case of the TEC inventing a substantive requirement to rulemaking,” the commission’s general counsel, James Tinsley, said before the vote. “It’s quite the opposite. It’s pairing back an exception.”

The rule change was strongly opposed by groups and figures funded by Dunn and Wilks, who decried it when it was first proposed earlier this year and claimed that the commission was creating a “secret speech police” that could target citizens for routine social media posts. Some of the loudest critics of the proposal, including the right-wing website Texas Scorecard, have for years been involved in lawsuits that challenged the constitutionality of the commission and sought to strip it of most of its regulatory powers.

Others argued that it did not go far enough because it held social media users accountable, but not those who pay them and fail to disclose as much.

“I just don’t want to pass the buck onto people that are literally only posting these because they’ll get $75, $80 or $90 out of it,” Andrew Cates, an Austin-based attorney focused on political campaigns, testified Tuesday.

The commission’s executive director, J.R. Johnson, agreed with Cates that the change is narrowly tailored, but added that it does prevent the commission from pursuing new rules in the future that deal with those who are paying social media users to post their political advertisements.

Campaign law experts have previously said that company’s like Influenceable reflect a decadeslong failure to modernize disclosure rules, many of which have not been updated since the widespread proliferation of social media or the internet.

“The [federal] laws around disclosure of campaign spending assumed a traditional model, like paying somebody to print your ad in the newspaper or paying a TV station to play your ad on the air,” Ian Vandewalker, an expert on the influence of money in politics and elections at the Brennan Center, told the Tribune last year. “Paying an influencer to talk about a candidate doesn’t fit into those traditional definitions, and so it’s slipping through the cracks.”

Texas has some restrictions on out-of-state donations, limits donations during the biennial legislative session and requires disclosures of political advertising that contain “express advocacy.” But otherwise, one longtime campaign finance lawyer said, the state’s rules allow “dark money to run amok.”

“If you’re not actually advocating for or against the election of someone or a proposition, then you pretty much fall outside” most regulations, Austin lawyer Roger Borgelt said last year.

This year, some Republican state lawmakers have called for ethics reform during the 2025 legislative session, citing what they said was a flood of misinformation and deceptive advertising during this year’s GOP primaries. Others directly cited Influenceable, and called for legislation to curb companies like it when lawmakers meet next year.

“I’m somebody who cares about truth and motivation,” State Rep. Tom Oliverson, a Cypress Republican who is currently running for Texas House Speaker, told the Tribune last summer. “I really dislike manufactured outrage and manufactured narratives. I prefer people to be honest, straightforward and truthful. And so I do think that, at a bare minimum, these things should have to be disclosed.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at www.texastribune.org. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans – and engages with them – about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.