FEBRUARY FREEZE GIVES COB $10 MILLION IN COLD HARD CASH

By Juan Montoya

Less than a year ago – in fact, last February – as the winter storm hit and knocked out utility services, many Texans huddled in the dark for warmth and waited for authorities to inform them when the lights and water would return.

The Texas Tribune reports that many cities have now taken steps to prevent a similar energy outage from occurring. 

But what the Tribune did not report was that membership in ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) obligates members like the Brownsville Public Utility Board to produce power and place it on the grid instead of using it to provide power to its residents.

After the storm, PUB CEO John Bruciak told city commission members that PUB had been ordered by ERCOT to produce power – that apparently  included the diesel-fueled Silas Ray plant – and told to feed the statewide grid instead of providing power to local rate payers.

The plant is 100 percent owned by the people of Brownsville and once fired could produce enough energy to continuously power not only Brownsville, but San Benito, Los Fresno's and Port Isabel.

During a PUB/COB press conference, Bruciak admitted that rather then keep the electricity PUB produced here, they sold 80 percent of it to the ERCOT grid and allowed the rolling blackouts for Brownsville. 

Brownsville residents had to deal  with spoiled food in their refrigerators, life-and-death situations by people on electric-powered medical devices, and inoperable traffic lights where cars played a game of chicken at intersections with other desperate drivers to get through.

Well, the city can now thank the residents for enduring three days without power in freezing temperatures for a $10 million bonus. Sources say that the city was expecting a $9 million transfer called for in the city charter, but that partly as a result of the power sold during the freeze, the PUB earned an extra $100 million inn gross revenues through the sale of the energy it produced in the open market.

That means the city transfer this year will be closer to $20 million. That was generated on the back of PUB customers, particularly residential rate payers.

We have often wondered why Brownsville continues to employ Bruciak and his select cadre of underachievers.  As a $300,000(+) salary, Bruciak championed the construction of the Tenaska Plant project that ended as a debacle with ratepayers shouldering a 35 percent hike in utilities to fund the $500 million plant, only to have the private energy firm inform PUB they were pulling out of the project and cancelling it four years later because of a glut of electricity available in the grid. 

But by then, PUB ratepayers had already piled up more than $130 million in increased energy rates in PUB coffers destined for the plant. 

That money "disappeared" and only $29 million were left, an amount suggested by Bruciak be used for LED lighting to be administered by...PUB, of course.

When asked why the rates could not be reduced to pre-Tenaska project levels, Bruciak told the commissioners that if that was done, the $9 million annual "transfer" to the city might have to be reduced, or totally eliminated. That cowed the city commission– who depend on the transfer to balance the city budget annually – and they stopped asking.

With the additional $100 million in additional revenues because of the sale of Brownsville energy on the open market periodically – and particularly during the freeze – it once again appears that the overpaid energy "gurus" under Bruciak over at PUB were wrong again. 

Will the city commission complain about the $10 million increase in the PUB transfer, or will they echo Bruciak's sentiments that the public be damned?