Court Opinion

ID: 9655575
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 19:15:50.696244+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:20.138608
License: Public Domain

Justice HECHT,
joined by Chief Justice PHILLIPS, Justice ABBOTT, Justice HANKINSON, and Justice JEFFERSON,
concurring.
We join fully in the Court’s judgment and in Justice Owen’s concurring opinion. This is the opinion of the Court regarding the validity of the “non-standard true-up” included in the Public Utility Commission’s financing order for TXU Electric Company.
The financing order for TXU contains a non-standard true-up procedure essentially identical to the one in the financing order for Central Power and Light Company, which we approve today in City of Corpus Christi v. Public Utility Commission, 51 S.W.3d 231 (Tex.2001). A Commission witness testified that if any TXU customer class experienced a decrease in power usage of more than six to nine percent, that class would be “at risk for a cascading loss scenario.” The arguments for and against that procedure in this case are the same as those made in Corpus Christi with one exception. Nucor Steel, one of TXU’s largest customers, argues that any overpayments or underpayments of transition charges by any one class should be reallocated among all TXU’s customers, thereby fully cross-col-lateralizing responsibility for the transition as TXU proposed to the Commission. Without deciding whether the Commission was empowered to depart this far from the allocation requirements of section 39.253, we easily conclude that the Commission was not required to adopt this approach instead of the somewhat more restricted non-standard true-up. For the same reasons explained in our concurring opinion in that case, we approve of the non-standard true-up procedure in this case.