This commentary originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman on October 20, 2013.
Any championship football coach can tell you that successfully converting a fourth and long does not depend on making a quick decision; it depends on making the right decision. Considering that a bad call could add upwards of $4 billion per year to Texans’ electricity bills, the Public Utility Commission of Texas should heed that gridiron wisdom when deciding the fate of Texas’ competitive electricity market.
For more than a year, the PUC has debated whether to abandon Texas’ competitive, energy-only market for a system of centralized planning and corporate subsidies. Commonly called a capacity market, this corporate redistribution scheme would issue generating companies a string of subsidies in the hopes of encouraging more investment in new generation