LP&L’s McCullough substation located on Elgin St. Photo by Reece Nations.
By Reece Nations
If harsh enough winter weather descends by the time Lubbock Power & Light starts its grid switchover, the process could stall and delay city council’s certification.
Some meteorologists are forecasting a cooler and wetter winter due to a strong El Niño expected to progress through the Northern Hemisphere until spring, according to a National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center advisory.
At an electric utility board meeting on Monday, Nov. 13, LP&L Director Joel Ivy said if a significant enough weather event hits the area in less than a month, the resolution could have to wait until the city council’s following meeting in January.
“We’ve had too many delays and too many obstacles, and I think that we have just knocked them all down,” Ivy said of the utility’s transition to a competitive market. “Everybody’s done a great job.”
If all goes according to plan, then the city council could certify the switchover’s completion during its Dec. 12 meeting, one day after the process is scheduled to finish. Beginning on Jan. 5, the shopping window for wholesale electricity providers will open and the transition to a competitive retail market will be complete.
LP&L first announced it would seek approval to emigrate to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT grid, in Sept. 2015. Matt Rose, spokesperson for LP&L, said one factor that led the utility company towards ERCOT were the old grid’s organizational rules that severely limited which companies the municipal utility could make deals with.
Transmission lines at LP&L’s McCullough substation on Elgin St. Photo by Reece Nations.
“One of the reasons it made sense for Lubbock to do this is that we had for a number of years talked through building a very large power plant,” Rose said. “Because of the rules in the Southwest Power Pool, [and because] we were geographically isolated at the very bottom of the power pool… if we were to stay in [SPP], we would have built a power plant estimated to be about $750 million.”
In this scenario, Rose said LP&L’s ratepayers would have been the ones to recoup the costs of the plant’s construction. While ERCOT’s rules give municipalities a wider array of options for their customers, the competition aspect of switching grids was only a small factor in igniting the initial push.
The deliberations and decision-making that fueled Lubbock’s move from SPP began years in advance of Winter Storm Uri of 2021, Rose said. Lubbock Power & Light announced last year it would no longer serve the Lubbock market as an electricity provider beginning in the fall, instead focusing operations on collecting revenue from and maintaining the transmission lines it still owns.
Originally, LP&L scheduled its offloading of remaining SPP power loads for May of this year before it was postponed until next month. Now that it’s through with contractual obligations to SPP, Rose said LP&L is looking to leave the electrical power generating business altogether.
Transformer at LP&L’s McCullough substation. Photo by Reece Nations.
“We, like everybody else, have gone through the process post-Winter Storm Uri [and] two legislative sessions, watching the reforms and trying to make sense of how that affects us locally, how that affects reliability in our region,” Rose said. “We are blessed that by building the transmission lines we did we’re now in a region that is very transmission wealthy. We have plenty of transmission lines to move power around.”
However, Rose said the overall health of the grid system is “still something that affects us.”
Still, the board’s optimism for the transition appeared to outweigh any concerns about the stability of ERCOT’s grid.
LP&L Chief Financial Officer Harvey Hall said at the electric utility board meeting that the time was finally right to transition grids because the company is “in a very strong cash position.” At the meeting on Monday, the utility board determined that all conditions of its customer choice and retail competition resolution passed last year were satisfied and approved sending the matter to city council.
“Our operating income is 20%, over what we thought it would be,” Hall said, addressing the board on Monday. “So, we’re entering into the market in a very strong financial position to be able to manage whatever lies ahead.”
Murals adorning LP&L’s McCullough substation. Photo by Reece Nations.
Hall added that rating agencies are ready and waiting to give LP&L a credit rating once the cutover event is complete. When the crediting agencies were told that 37 wholesale electric providers were prepared to supply power for both residential and business customers before the transition was even finished, Hall said they were enthused at the prospect of rating LP&L.
When LP&L, the city’s sole municipal electric utility, commenced its transition away from SPP in May 2021, it disconnected roughly 83,000 customers from the grid that powers the rest of the region. Across three days next month, the remaining 30% of LP&L customers who remain on the grid operated by SPP will be switched over a few substations at a time until none remain.
The process, outlined at the meeting by LP&L Operations Manager Cody Kirk, requires the customers to temporarily go without power while the switching occurs. Starting Dec. 9, a total of three substations and 21 circuits will be offloaded through seven separate outages.
This will intermittently affect over 10,000 customers but should only take a few hours in total to complete, Kirk said. The next day almost 7,500 customers will be affected by three more substations and 11 circuits being de-energized, plugged into ERCOT transmission lines, and fired back up again.
The process will repeat itself a final time on Dec. 11 where a final four circuits and 1,846 customers will be transferred. Kirk said LP&L will make efforts to notify every affected customer of their brief electricity interruption ahead of time, and that customer service staff were equipped to deal with complaints.
In all, Kirk said the full “cutover event” is comprised of 416 individual switching steps, and that a vast amount of work went into inspecting, mapping and switching critical circuits. While some legacy substations will eventually be decommissioned in order to streamline distribution, it is unclear when this will take place.
“A lot of the work is not able to [take] place via the control room,” Kirk said. “We are not able to do it all remotely from our local control room. We have to coordinate with the personnel and have them actually open or close switchable devices in the field, and that process is a little bit more tedious.”
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