The Texas utility manager rejected calls on Friday to repair the $ 16 billion surcharge that occurred amid power outages caused by last month’s winter storm.
Arthur D’Andrea, chairman of the Texas Public Utilities Commission, suggested Friday, at a committee meeting, that the error would be too difficult to fix, American-American Austin reported.
“It is almost impossible to lay this type of egg,” he said, according to media reports.
D’Andrea added that any action designed to help customers could have unintended consequences due to out-of-sight private transactions, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“You think you’re protecting the consumer and it’s proving that you’re bankrupting a cooperative or a city,” D’Andrea said.
The comments come after Potomac Economics’ third-party market monitoring, which the state has hired, ended that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) overcharged $ 16 billion for electricity during the winter storm.
During the storm, ERCOT implemented controlled outages across the country to prevent damage to the power grid. ERCOT CEO Bill Magness The Texas Tribune said last month that the decision was made to prevent the network from going down.
ERCOT set prices at a limit of $ 9,000 per megawatt hour during outages. However, the monitor said that prices should have been reset after the end of the controlled interruptions.
Texas is still facing the failure of the winter storm that led to dozens of deaths, and the management of the situation by ERCOT has since come under intense control.