Ex-Treasury official to join Biden council

Ernie Tedeschi, managing director and policy economist for Evercore ISI, announced Friday that he will be joining the Council of Economic Advisers as a senior policy economist.

Tedeschi, who formerly served as an economist at the Treasury Department, has been a prominent economic voice in the pandemic. His analysis is often published in the New York Times, and his columns have spanned a range of economic topics including the minimum wage and the effect of school closures on mothers’ participation in the workforce.

He will be joining a team that already includes Chair Cecilia Rouse, members Heather Boushey and Jared Bernstein, and senior adviser Martha Gimbel.

Tedeschi will start March 15. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Portuguese utility EDPEnergias de Portugal SA is among the wind-farm owners that took a hit from the deep freeze that upended Texas last month.

The financial impact was in the “low tens of millions” of dollars, Chief Executive Officer Miguel Stilwell Andrade said in an interview. That’s a relatively modest hit compared to some other wind producers that racked up hundreds of millions in losses, he said.

Last month’s arctic blast knocked nearly half of Texas power generation offline, left millions of homes and business without heat and light for days, and killed dozens of people. Wind turbines across Texas froze, and projects from some companies including Innergex Renewable Energy Inc. and RWE saw production curtailments. In some instances, wind operators unable to produce were forced to buy electricity at the $9,000-per-megawatt-hour price cap to fulfill delivery commitments.

Much, though not all, of EDP’s Texas portfolio benefits from power-purchase agreements, which limited losses. If assets with such contracts weren’t producing, they didn’t have to deliver energy, Andrade said.

“In Texas most people were having to deliver energy which they didn’t have, and so they were having to buy it in the market,” Andrade said.

Of EDP’s more than 1 gigawatt of assets in Texas, only 10 percent was affected by the freeze, showing “we have effectively a low-risk portfolio,” he said.

Despite the weather impacts, Andrade said companies probably won’t winterize their Texas assets, calling the storm that crippled the state’s grid “a once in a century event.”

“Typically the thinking would be that you wouldn’t necessarily need to pay to insure that risk,” he said. “But obviously it’s something that everyone will be looking at.”