Jacob Ford/Odessa American via AP
Ice and snow blanket parts of Grandview Avenue and Charles Walker Road, in Odessa, Texas, February 15, 2021.
“Your power, our promise.” In 2017, the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) trademarked the slogan that’s splayed across its website. Nearing the 50th anniversary of operating the state’s electric grid, the slogan probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Today, it’s more like a grim punch line for the millions of people suffering from rolling blackouts and complete power loss since the energy crisis began last weekend.
The ERCOT meltdown is as much a man-made disaster as a meteorological one, caused by Texas politicians and policymakers. In a nod to the state’s fabled independence and rugged individualism, lawmakers designed a state-run nonprofit to oversee its electricity grid in 1970, the only one of its kind in the United States. But Texas had been avoiding federal energy regulation since the New Deal, and walled off the state’s grid from the rest of the country’s transmission links to avoid that oversight.
As climate change heralds more unusual weather patterns and more severe storms, Texas’s deliberate and cynical policy decisions underline the perils of an unregulated state energy market. In the complex world of energy generation, prices can shoot skyward during peak demand, such as when people want to crank up the heat in polar vortex cold. Since ERCOT does not have extensive interconnections with the two other major electric grids in the United States, it has few options to tap into other power sources beyond its borders. Still worse, Texas electricity prices continue to skyrocket beyond the reach of federal regulators, and those sharp spikes are passed to customers. But a few fortunate Texas communities like El Paso rely on other regional utilities. The city has not suffered blackouts; only 12 customers lost power.
Texas Republicans blamed wind energy for the state’s predicament, in much the same way that they dodged responsibility for mitigating the early harms of the COVID pandemic. They came up with a Big Lie: in this case, blaming frozen turbines for the state’s plight, while failing to realize that Northern states have weatherization protocols that Texas ignored, and that countries like Norway and Finland build wind farms in the Arctic.
Wind provides only a small fraction of the state’s energy mix, with even less reliance expected in winter. Texas relies primarily on natural gas, which an ERCOT official finally underscored in a statement after the blame-seeking disinformation campaign launched by Houston-area Rep. Dan Crenshaw and others. Natural gas is the top fuel source, but as gas lines, wellheads, and other equipment froze solid, ERCOT could not supply the fuel to meet the demand for electricity. Power stations went offline. The grid “seconds and minutes” away from a total collapse that would have thrown Texas in the dark for months.
After a plea from Gov. Greg Abbott, President Biden quietly signed a federal emergency order that unleashed federal resources to Texas, a sea change from the spectacle of Democratic mayors and governors by turns irate and groveling when disasters struck during the Trump years. Yet Tim Boyd, the mayor of Colorado City, Texas, still managed to blame residents who reached out to the city for help for not being tough enough to survive the crisis without handouts from “a socialist government” presumably in Washington. Handouts, in this case, equaled electric power that residents pay for. He soon resigned. Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted, “Stay Safe!” and headed off to Cancun.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) regulates wholesale electricity prices and interstate commerce. Federal regulation can help determine if electricity rates are “just and fair,” which would advantage Texas ratepayers over ERCOT’s bottom line. According to Heather Payne, a professor of energy and environmental law at the Seton Hall University School of Law, Texas regulators were so fearful of federal regulators that they worried about unwelcome interest from Washington before they tried to secure power from California, via transmission links in Mexico.
The lengths to which Texas has gone to avoid federal regulation would be comical if it weren’t for the tragic consequences. The toughen-up edicts ignore the hardships faced by the poor, the elderly, and disabled. “Right now, your disabled community is dying,” Ralph Garcia, a young man with muscular dystrophy, told Deceleration, a San Antonio–area climate-justice journal. “This is not me overreacting, this is how it is.” Garcia lives with his mother, who has cancer. They have only intermittent bursts of electricity to run the devices he relies on to help him breathe, eat, and manage his condition. Since they are both immunocompromised and cannot head to a shelter, they have moved into a single room, covering windows with blankets and sheets to stay warm.
Will the winter of 2021 persuade Texans that the feds aren’t so bad after all?
As for ERCOT’s own oversight, five members of the board of directors do not live in Texas. (One lives in Eastern Canada.) Under ERCOT bylaws, “residency is preferred but not required.” Nor does the nonprofit’s “Strategic Plan, 2019-2023” provide any clues to where the company is headed. The document appears deliberately vague, filled with statements like “The main point of defining strategy is to direct action that will move the strategy forward.” It lacks the details that such plans typically provide; a short section labeled “Changing resource mix” fails to mention renewables, transitioning from fossil fuels, or climate change.
FERC and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit charged with monitoring the reliability and security of the electricity grid, have announced investigations into the debacle. One major consequence of the deregulated market is that individual operators do not make adequate capital investments. State operators are paid for energy that they put into the grid, so weatherization is an unwelcome “excess” business expense. A few days of cold weather doesn’t merit the expense, so they don’t purchase the cold-weather equipment that they need to deal with changing weather patterns.
Yet FERC and NERC recommended that ERCOT address its issues a decade ago.
In 2011, Texas faced blackouts during several days of unseasonably cold weather. The FERC–North American Electric Reliability Corporation investigation into that episode noted eight prior cases of below-normal temperatures that ERCOT had to contend with. The report concluded, “The single largest problem during the cold weather event was the freezing of instrumentation and equipment. Many generators failed to adequately prepare for winter.”
The intervening decade proves that it’s easier for Texas leaders to blame wind turbines and the Green New Deal than to provide the state oversight to force ERCOT to make the necessary capital investments. The prudent way for Texas to address the problem would be to build additional transmission to access interconnections across state lines when crises strike. That means accepting federal regulation. “If you still want to stay in your independent cells, and not interconnect, you just have to plan your grid in a different way,” says Payne. “Because obviously, you’re not taking into account the weather that we’re going to have.”
Will the winter of 2021 persuade Texans that the feds aren’t so bad after all? The answer should be clear, but as with all things Texas, it’s complicated.
