During the deadly winter storms that rocked Texas in February 2021, the state’s Public Utility Commission raised the wholesale price of electricity to the maximum $9,000 per megawatt-hour—a rate as much as 300 times higher than normal—in hopes of spurring additional power generation. The Commission kept the level there for four days—something an independent monitor has since determined led to some $16 billion in overcharges. 

This week’s Litigators of the Week—Allyson Ho and Mike Raiff of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and Bill Moore of Enoch Kever—got a blockbuster win last week for client Luminant Energy Co. at the state’s Third District Court of Appeals finding that the Public Utility Commission’s moves violated its statutory mandate to “use competitive methods to the greatest extent feasible and impose the least impact on competition.”