Turner to Congress: Blackouts were ‘foreseeable, preventable’
WASHINGTON — The massive loss of power generation in Texas during last month’s winter storm was “foreseeable and preventable,” Mayor Sylvester Turner told a congressional panel Wednesday.
Five weeks after the storm left millions of Texans without power for days, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations took testimony from Turner and other Texas officials, including Bill Magness, outgoing president of ERCOT, and Christi Craddick, chair of the Texas Railroad Commission, in a bid to learn from the event and prevent other grids from suffering a similar fate during extreme weather.
Turner, a Democrat and former state legislator, argued that after a 2011 winter storm caused rolling blackouts in Texas, state regulators should have taken steps to ensure that power plants were protected against cold
weather.
“The Texas grid was designed for the summer heat, and policymakers bet what happened in 2011 was an anomaly,” he said. “The magnitude of the damages was foreseeable and preventable. The Texas grid must be designed with a full appreciation of climate change is real and extreme weather events can occur throughout the year.”
Democrats’ questioning of decisions by GOP leaders in Austin drew criticism from Republicans on the committee that they were attempting to politicize the issue. Republicans have controlled the Texas governor’s office and the Legislature since the early 2000s.
“I hope this will be an informed and objective conversation about what problems we need to fix,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, said. “So far, I’ve heard some particularly partisan rhetoric.”
While state and federal regulators work to piece together the events that led to last month’s blackouts, there is consensus that power companies had not adequately protected their generating operations against cold weather, despite warnings from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that they needed to make changes.
When James Robb, president of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which sets standards for the power sector, was asked Wednesday if Texas had followed his organization’s recommendations after the 2011 blackouts, he said, “the evidence would suggest absolutely not.”
“Insufficient and inadequate weatherization of generation in Texas and the Middle South states has been a growing concern for us since 2012,” he said.
Members of both parties have used the events of last month’s blackouts to criticize the preferred energy sources of the opposition as unreliable in extreme weather. Republicans target wind and solar power while Democrats disparage coal and natural gas.
“Policies that drive renewables at the expense of firm baseload puts lives at risk,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., said at Wednesday’s hearing.
All power sources failed to some degree or another during the storm. But Robb made the case Wednesday that an increasingly de-carbonized grid using more solar and wind energy requires natural gas to maintain power supplies when wind decreases or the sun isn’t shining.
“Gas is the fuel that keeps the lights on,” he said. “More investment in transmission and gas infrastructure is going to be needed to improve the resiliency of the grid.”
During last month’s blackout, natural gas wells and pipelines froze or lost power..
Crews returned to natural gas fields to find they couldn’t resume production because their equipment had no power, Craddick testified.
“Frozen roadways prevented crews from going out, but the No. 1 problem was a lack of power at the production sites,” she said.