New ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas starts work Monday overseeing Texas’ beleaguered electricity grid, aiming to make it so reliable that Texans don’t think about it,...
Vegas’ salary, incentives and other payments will exceed $3 million, making him one of Texas’ top paid government workers — though not on the level of the state’s highest-paid football coach,Born in Peru, Vegas was raised in Indiana and studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. He moved into business management, which led him to Corpus Christi to work for the utility AEP Texas, serving the Gulf Coast, South Texas and parts of West Texas.
What really compelled me to this job and this opportunity was really about the underlying purpose of what our economy is about. ERCOT helps to support the reliable operations of electric service for the 26 million Texans and every business that relies on them. They are doing so in an environment where the economy is growing faster than anywhere else in the country, where the energy landscape is changing more rapidly and becoming more complex than anywhere else in the country.
The fact that the governor cares about it and wants to ensure that the [Public Utility Commission] and ERCOT have what they need in order to be successful is a great trait. That’s important, and I’m appreciative of that fact. The reality is the more political aspects of this job really do fall to the PUC. They are the more politically pointed entity in the whole process; they have that governance oversight role for ERCOT.
It’s a really concerning set of facts to hear that feedback, because what you want and expect for an electric grid is for people to not have to really think about it, because it’s always there. And it’s always reliable, and that, frankly, has been the goal of utilities and the electric grid operators.What I think we have to do to get back to that place where Texans don’t need to be thinking about this every day, we have to continue to execute.
[Note: Dispatchable energy refers to power provided by plants that operate on demand, most often by burning natural gas.]How do you view the future of Texas power production? What is the balance between clean, weather-dependent renewable energy and reliable fossil fuel generation?
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