Upgrade Marks 'Biggest Conversion Undertaking Market Has Experienced to Date'

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Inc. (ERCOT) announced today that the competitive market’s massive two-year project to automate the move-in/move-out process for electricity customers has launched successfully and seamlessly.

“This is a major milestone in the evolution of competitive choice in Texas electricity,” said ERCOT CEO Tom Schrader.  “This represents the collaborative process at its finest:  market participants and ERCOT working together and working hard, to do the right thing for the market.”

The Aug. 1 launch of the new automated system — the largest upgrade to date of the electronic transaction system that supports the restructured retail market — streamlines the complex move-in/move-out process and will make accurate and timely customer billing a less labor-intensive and time-consuming process in the future.

More than 40 different types of move-in/move-out operating rules — involving retail electric providers, transmission and distribution utilities, and ERCOT — were identified after the retail market opened in January 2002.  The process supporting the market, known as Texas Standard Electronic Transactions (Texas SET) was not originally designed to accommodate many of the issues.  Prior to the upgrade, these operating rules were accomplished largely through manual workarounds.  Texas SET describes the standard electronic data transactions, implementation guides, protocols, principles and procedures that enable and facilitate the processes of customer choice in the deregulated Texas electric market.

“The migration to Texas SET 2.0 is the biggest conversion undertaking the market has experienced to date,” said Tommy Weathersbee, market liaison manager for TXU Electric Delivery and the chairman of the ERCOT Retail Market Subcommittee.

“It was more complicated and involved more changes by more market participants than anything we had attempted.”

Weathersbee was one of numerous market participants, who along with some 50 ERCOT employees, spent the weekend, finalizing and monitoring the successful conversion.

“Everyone realized the magnitude and importance of the problem and was fully committed to success.  Much had been learned from prior conversions,” he said.  “The overwhelming success of this conversion resulted from a great job of planning and thorough communication.”

William Bell, team lead for operations and engineering and market testing for CenterPoint Energy and a member of the ERCOT committee which determines testing requirements for market changes, said the migration was “exponentially better” than the opening of the retail market.  He attributed the success of the effort to careful planning over the last two years, extensive internal testing by ERCOT staff and the market participants, a well-planned test flight, and excellent test execution by all market participants.

“Despite the greater difficulty, the market participants have become quite efficient in the manner and methods of conducting market certification tests,” Bell said.

Richard Gruber, director of market services for ERCOT, also praised the extensive preparations.

“A lot of very talented people, at both the market participant companies  and ERCOT, have put in countless hours and blood, sweat and tears to get this done and get it right,” Gruber said.  “The launch was invisible to customers and practically unnoticed, which is how it should be, and that is a great tribute to these folks’ expertise and dedication.”

Gruber said transaction processing since the implementation weekend has indicated no issues of significance.

“The system seems to be behaving as expected from a functional perspective and is stable from a technical perspective,” Gruber said.

One of the more challenging areas addressed by this system upgrade involves provider changes at rental units, where complex move-in/move-out scenarios involving multiple retail electric providers are commonplace.

For example, a renter using Reliant Energy may move out of an apartment, so the unit converts to the landlord’s provider of choice, which could be TXU Energy.  A new renter could move in within a few days, and that person may choose a third provider, such as Green Mountain Energy.  All of this requires multiple transactions to process through both the ERCOT system and the electric distribution company’s system in a short period of time.

ERCOT serves as the central hub of the retail transaction process that supports approximately 7 million customers in the competitive choice areas of Texas.  This includes all customers served by the ERCOT region’s investor-owned transmission and distribution utilities, and any municipally-owned utilities and electric cooperatives that choose to “opt in” to competition.

ERCOT’s retail transaction systems receive, process, and send approximately 412 million electronic transactions per year.

The Texas retail market is ranked first in the nation and third worldwide in the Retail Energy Deregulation Index of the Center for the Advancement of Energy Markets, a research group that measures the progress of electricity market restructuring to competitive markets.