Texas lawmakers pursue power-grid changes

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas’ power grid, which buckled during February’s deadly winter storm, would operate under new oversight and require power plants to prepare for more extreme weather under measures that moved closer to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk Tuesday.

Six weeks after more than 100 people died in subfreezing weather in Texas, including many of hypothermia, both the GOP-controlled House and Senate have now passed their own legislation that lawmakers say would prevent a repeat of the widespread blackouts that spiraled into one of the worst power outages in U.S. history.

But big issues remain unsettled, including who would pick up the cost of weatherizing Texas’ hundreds of power generators, which Abbott is demanding after plants failed in the cold weather and more than 4 million customers lost electricity.

Many families went without water and heat for days with no indication of when the power would be restored. One bill that easily cleared the Texas House on Tuesday is designed to force power companies to better communicate the extent of the outages in the middle of a blackout.

“They couldn’t even tell Texans that they were in danger,” said Democratic state Rep. Eddie Lucio III, whose district runs along the U.S.Mexico border. “There was an expectation in your district and in mine that the power was going to come back on at any minute, that we were all going to share in the burden. But what we experienced was it wasn’t that easy to turn the lights back on.”

Managers of the state’s embattled power grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, have said the blackouts were necessary to avert an even more catastrophic outage that could have lasted weeks. The state’s top energy regulators resigned in the wake of the outages, and council Chief Executive Officer Bill Magness was fired.

Last week, Texas officials nearly doubled the death toll of the winter storm and power outages to at least 111 people. The majority of the deaths are associated with hypothermia, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.