Oncor is supposed to be Texas’ largest regulated utility, and they are milking residents for an extra $60 million in profits during the scorching heat wave this summer.
As sweltering temperatures has driven electricity usage to new highs this summer (2022), Dallas-based Oncor’s quarterly profit soared an extra $60M in just one quarter to $229 million. The quarterly profits didn’t include July, which was one of the states hottest months on record.
Oncor CEO Allen Nye thinks is has been a great quarter… for the company. For residents fighting economic slowdowns and inflation, not so much.
The second quarter brought on record heat, beginning one of the hottest summers on record. That heat has led to several new peak demand records, with ERCOT peak demand of nearly 80,000 megawatts for the first time in July. The market continues to grow and will require new generation, transmission and distribution resources. Oncor’s service area, the largest in the state, covers all of North Texas and parts of West Texas, Central Texas and East Texas. Oncor will need to be ready to make the investments necessary to support the needs of the growing state. The Texas company added 19,000 additional premises and saw a 73% increase in new transmission point-of-interconnection requests in the second quarter, which is an all-time record for new transmission interconnection requests.
There is also an increase in major manufacturing expected to arrive in Oncor’s service territory over the next several years.
A $5 billion silicon wafer manufacturing facility being built by GlobiTech has been approved, on top of another $30 billion semiconductor wafer manufacturing plant project being undertaken by Texas Instruments, both in Sherman. A Samsung chip manufacturing facility, estimated at $17 billion, is also coming to Taylor in central Texas.
Oncor does not charge customers; instead, customers buy electricity through providers, known as Retail Electric Providers, and Oncor charges the providers for delivering their electricity. The company charges REPs a fixed amount monthly for each customer, plus a charge for how much electricity is used by the customer. Yet, they continue to increase their fees, which end of forcing Retail Electricity Providers to increase the electric rate they charge customers.
Profits Over Residential Electricity Customers
Oncor is justifying the profit grab because it believes the territory has become a powerhouse for manufacturing critical to the future economic and national security of the United States. The profits were driven by increases in revenues from higher customer consumption attributable primarily to significantly warmer weather in the second quarter of 2022 and other factors, including increases in electric rates, the company said in a news release.
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