Final Public Utility Commission of Texas member Chair Arthur D’Andrea resigns
The sole remaining member of the Public Utility Commission of Texas has resigned following last month’s power grid collapse, Gov. Greg Abbott announced late Tuesday.
Abbott appointed Arthur D’Andrea to the three-person commission in November 2017. He was named as chairman on March 3 after DeAnn Walker resigned amid calls for her to leave the post after the winter storm that left millions without power. Commissioner Shelly Botkin resigned days later.
“Tonight, I asked for and accepted the resignation of PUC Commissioner Arthur D’Andrea,” Abbott said in a statement. “I will be naming a replacement in the coming days who will have the responsibility of charting a new and fresh course for the agency. Texans deserve to have trust and confidence in the Public Utility Commission, and this action is one of many steps that will be taken to achieve that goal.”
D’Andrea’s resignation letter, dated March 16, did not elaborate on the reason for his departure.
“I hereby resign effective immediately upon the appointment of my successor,” the letter reads. “I am grateful for the opportunity I had to serve the state of Texas.”
His exit follows a Tuesday report by Texas Monthly that D’Andrea participated in a 48-minute call related to electricity pricing during the winter storm held by Bank of America Securities on March 9. During the conversation, D’Andrea spoke with out-of-state investors who profited from the storm and tried to quell concerns about repricing, according to Texas Monthly, which obtained audio of the conversation.
“I took that first step to tip the scale as hard as I could in favor of it being resolved and that being the status quo, and that’s to provide some calming force,” he said. “It’s also become a political question here at the state. There’s some very important people that do not want to reprice full stop, and there’s very important people that do.”
He continued to “apologize for the instability.”
“I wish I could tell you there’s just no way in heck it will ever get repriced. I just can’t, because … if enough legislators want something done, they can pass a bill and get it done,” D’Andrea said. “Right now it’s just a contentious political issue, and I’m advising on it and the best I can do is put the weight of the commission in favor of not repricing for the reasons I said.”
On Feb. 15 at the direction of the Public Utility Commission, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas upped its real-time electricity prices to the maximum limit of $9,000 per megawatt hour. The decision reflected the scarcity of electricity and was meant to incentivize electricity generation.
That $9,000 cap was kept for at least 32 hours after most outages ended on late Feb. 17, according to a report from Potomac Economics, the commission’s independent market monitor.
The Senate on Monday passed a bill on the same day it was filed to reverse the $16 billion in charges to the electricity market. But whether to reverse charges has divided House Speaker Dade Phelan and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has led the repricing push in the Senate. A House committee heard testimony on the charges on Tuesday, but hasn’t considered the Senate’s bill specifically.
D’Andrea has advocated against repricing because he said it could create new problems for customers and electricity providers.
“It’s nearly impossible to unscramble this sort of egg, and the results of going down this path are unknowable,” D’Andrea said at a recent PUC meeting. “We’ve already set a path, we know who is hurt by that and we can focus on helping the people that were hurt instead of throwing everything up into the air again, creating another huge mess, and then a month from now we’ll have a different set of people who are hurt and we have to focus on helping them.”
Before his appointment to the PUC, D’Andrea served as assistant general counsel to Abbott.
Also during the call reported by Texas Monthly, D’Andrea suggested he’d be the only PUC commissioner for a while, telling those on the call Abbott would likely not name new commissioners during the legislative session.
“I went from being on a very hot seat to having one of the safest jobs in Texas,” D’Andrea said. “I think it’s just going to be me for a while now.”
A spokesperson for Abbott did not immediately return a request for comment on Texas Monthly’s report or provide details on whether the resignation was related.
State Rep. Chris Turner, a Grand Prairie Democrat who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, said Democrats have been “calling for accountability from the PUC since the very beginning of this disaster.”
“Whether repricing is the right policy or not, it seems the former commissioner’s priority was to protect the profits of out-of-state energy traders,” Turner said in a Wednesday statement. “The secret, leaked audio makes clear that — despite the Commission’s name — the governor’s appointees were actually working for Wall Street, not for the public.“
Staff Writer Haley Samsel contributed to this report.
This story was originally published March 16, 2021 at 9:20 PM.
