It was a $1.9 billion bill that forced Brazos Electric Power Cooperative, one of Texas’ oldest and most creditworthy power sellers, into bankruptcy last year. Now a federal judge is being asked to make more than half the sum disappear, Bloomberg News reported. Brazos Electric on Tuesday kicked off a long-awaited trial against the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, over sky-high power bills racked up during a devastating winter storm last year. Ercot raised prices to $9,000 per megawatt-hour — the legal maximum — for several days during the storm, forcing Brazos to buy electricity so pricey it became insolvent in a flash. The extreme prices were supposed to encourage idle generators to provide electricity, but any plants that weren’t frozen or lacking fuel were already producing power, lawyers for Brazos said in a Houston courtroom Tuesday. Their contention is that Ercot wrongly meddled in the market, and without that interference Brazos would owe about $800 million rather than $1.9 billion. “We don’t dispute what we bought, we don’t dispute how much we bought — what we dispute is the price,” Lino Mendiola, an attorney for Brazos, told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David R. Jones in Houston on Tuesday. “It was literally the most expensive thing Ercot could’ve done and it accomplished nothing.”
