A court victory for ERCOT, the operator of the power grid in Texas.
The Texas Supreme Court ruled that ERCOT cannot be sued from the 2021 deadly winter storm Uri, the same storm that resulted in historic natural gas prices and rolling blackouts in Oklahoma.
It was a 5-4 ruling in which the Supreme Court reversed an earlier judgment from a Dallas state appeals court. The justices threw out lawsuits that had been filed by San Antonio’s municipal electric utility and a private energy developer reported the Dallas Morning News.
In the ruling, the justices declared ERCOT to be a governmental entity in the lawsuit in which ERCOT had claimed it was under government protection from the lawsuits.
The court said the Electric Reliability Council of Texas was a government created nonprofit corporation that is regulated by the state’s Public Utility Commission and because of that, it should be immune to lawsuits.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas runs the country’s sole power grid contained wholly within a single state. It encompasses roughly 75% of the state and maintains a grid providing electricity to 90% of Texas’ population. It is a government created nonprofit corporation that is regulated by the Public Utility Commission.