On Brink of Blackouts, Texas Makes Case for New Plants (1)

It may be time to start building power plants in Texas again.

The state’s generators made a killing this week as unrelenting heat sent electricity prices skyrocketing to unprecedented levels, briefly blowing past a $9,000 a megawatt-hour ceiling. That put producers more than three-quarters of the way toward profits that the state’s power market monitor says could touch off a power plant build-out. And the region’s only halfway into the cooling season.

“We need these kinds of days” to demonstrate that the state is ripe for new plants, Scott Burger, a energy research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of ...