Interesting to think how this becomes an immigration issue-- thanks for that insight Rao. Does the ongoing pandemic make this angle of trying to fill these key roles more challenging though? Is there a more immediate plan to 'fill the gap'?

ERCOT certainly has had it's share of challenges over the years. I was working as a contractor in ERCOT on their EDI and data exchange applications when I was informed that my services were no longer needed, no explanation was provided. A few years later I found out why, it turns out I was replaced by someone who was deceased in one of those fake contracts. A friend joked with me that productivity increased - what he meant was the "dead guy" was charging more hours than I was. Fact can be stranger than fiction. 

A former FBI agent and security manager for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas received a 12-year prison sentence for his role in a security contract scam that tarnished the state's electricity grid operator's reputation and cost it millions of dollars.

Luquis, a former FBI agent who was stationed in New York City at the time of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, resigned from the agency to join ERCOT as a security manager. It was in that capacity, Abbott says, that he began cobbling together phony security contract schemes with other defendants to defraud ERCOT out of millions.

Three remaining defendants all pleaded guilty to felonies and await sentencing

The three, all former employees or managers at ERCOT, are Ken Shoquist, chief information officer; Chris Uranga, director of information technology operations and corporate security; and Chris Douglas, senior manager of ERCOT's Data Warehouse.

Rao, it's wonderful that foreign workers can get temporary work visas through the H1-B program - for them. For a while.

For displaced American engineers, ones equally qualified, even ones who were hired and trained by FERC, then fired because workers from developing countries would work for half the salary they were earning, it sucks.

When their visas expire, it will suck for many of those aspiring foreign engineers, too. Though they were promised by their employers they would be sponsored to become U.S. citizens, they will instead be fired and replaced by another hopeful immigrant - often from their native country - with the same hopes, dreams, and misplaced trust in the "Land of Opportunity". Rinse, repeat.

That's the other side of the story.