On the morning of December 11, Texas public power utility Lubbock Power & Light finished connecting the remaining 30% of its system to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
“The completion of this historic move concludes over eight years of work and constitutes the largest migration of electrical load in state history,” the utility said.
Work to convert all remaining LP&L customers from the Southwest Power Pool to ERCOT began early Saturday morning and concluded mid-morning Monday. Crews worked from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday before wrapping up the final two stages Monday morning. All conversion work was completed without a single safety incident.
“This is a historic event for LP&L, its valued customers and the City of Lubbock,” said Joel Ivy, Chief Administrative Officer for LP&L.“We sincerely thank each and every individual that has worked to make this day possible since we first announced the move to ERCOT in September 2015. We could not be more proud of the end result and now we focus our attention on getting our customers to the retail competitive market over the next 90 days.”
LP&L noted that it diligently worked to plan the second and final migration of customers for several years and the result was a seamless migration of customers from one power grid to another.
Over the weekend, affected customers were told to expect a one-time outage lasting no more than 30 minutes. The average outage time per customer over the three-day project was just under 10 minutes. During the first migration of customers to ERCOT over Memorial Day 2021, the average outage time per customer was 16 minutes.
LP&L has long said it will open Lubbock to a competitive retail electric market once 100 percent of customers are connected to the ERCOT grid.
With the conclusion of this project, LP&L can proceed with opening a six-week electric provider shopping window running from January 5–February 15, 2024.
Starting in March 2024, LP&L will migrate all customers to their chosen providers over the course of the month.
Lubbock’s municipally owned utility will then transition to being a transmission and distribution utility whose primary focus will be the safe and efficient delivery of power from a citizen’s chosen providers.
