New ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas starts work Monday overseeing Texas’ beleaguered electricity grid, aiming to make it so reliable that Texans don’t think about it, even in frigid or scorching temperatures.
Vegas, 49, comes to an agency that continues to absorb blame for the catastrophic February 2021 winter storm. More than 200 Texans died, according to official estimates, although others put that number much higher.
“What ERCOT has been doing over the last 12 to 18 months has been executing,” Vegas said. “They’ve been improving the way that they operate the grid so that they never come to a place where they have to ask somebody not to have power.”
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which has around 800 employees, has been without a permanent CEO since its board fired Bill Magness in March 2021.
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Vegas’ salary, incentives and other payments will exceed $3 million, making him one of Texas’ top paid government workers — though not on the level of the state’s highest-paid football coach, Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher, who earns $9 million a year.
Born in Peru, Vegas was raised in Indiana and studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. He moved into business management, which led him to Corpus Christi to work for the utility AEP Texas, serving the Gulf Coast, South Texas and parts of West Texas. He continued to work for AEP in Ohio before moving to the utility NiSource in 2016. He left there as vice president and chief operating officer.
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