Oncor reported that its quarterly profit for April-June was up by $6 million from the previous quarter. The Dallas-based electric transmission company credits its ability to cope with high demand from the soaring temperatures for Q2’s increased earnings.
“It has been a great quarter, and I am so proud of our financial and operational performance,” Oncor CEO Allen Nye said. “The second quarter brought on record heat, beginning one of the hottest summers here in Texas in recent memory. That heat has led to several new peak demand records, with ERCOT peak demand of nearly 80,000 megawatts for the first time in July.”
As The Dallas Express previously reported, over the same period of time that the company was reporting these record earnings, Oncor customers across the state were facing power outages. The company said the cause of most of the outages was the soaring heat.
Oncor explained in a press release that it had invested in building more connections to capitalize on a growing market while also updating existing infrastructure.
“We added 19,000 additional premises and saw a 73% increase in new transmission point-of-interconnection requests in the second quarter,” Nye said. “This represents an all-time record for new transmission interconnection requests.”
The press release points out that these expansions happened despite supply-chain delays, limited construction materials, high-interest rates, and inflation.
Nye also highlighted an increase in major manufacturing expected to arrive in Oncor’s service territory over the next several years.
Oncor is coordinating with officials to provide power to three major plants, now under construction: a $5 billion silicon wafer manufacturing facility for GlobiTech, a $30 billion semiconductor wafer manufacturing plant for Texas Instruments– both in Sherman– and a Samsung chip manufacturing facility, estimated at $17 billion, in Taylor.
“The Oncor service territory has become a powerhouse for advanced, highly skilled manufacturing critical to the future economic and national security of the United States,” Nye claimed.