Blackouts bring up ‘a four-letter word’ in Texas: regulation

AUSTIN, Texas — All the groceries spoiled and the water was out for days. Then Melissa Rogers, a believer in the Texas gospel that government should know its place, woke up to a $6,000 energy bill before the snow and ice even melted.

“The roads were awful, but we were running around town trying to get money from every single bank we could possibly think of,” said Rogers, 36, whose Fort Worth family of four was left with $80 after the charges drained her accounts and took her husband’s paycheck.

Now, the emerging response to a winter catastrophe that caused one of the worst power outages in U.S. history is not the usual one in Texas: demands for more regulation.

On Thursday, managers of Texas’ power grid are expected to receive a lashing in the first public hearings about the crisis at the state Capitol — where the belief that less government is better is reflected in a part-time Legislature that meets just once every two years, and only for 140 days. The current session ends in May.

That leaves Texas little time to make last week’s plunge into freezing darkness that touched nearly all of the state’s 30 million residents one way or another — including grocery shelves left bare and miles of busted water pipes — produce tougher regulations that the state’s GOP majority has resisted for decades. At the same time, warnings ignored after a previous deep Texas freeze in 2011 have baked in skepticism.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott wants to force power plants to winterize after nearly half of the state’s generation capacity was knocked offline by subfreezing temperatures. There’s also new support for guardrails on Texas’ deregulated electric market to prevent astronomical energy bills that financially devastated homeowners like Rogers, who frantically emptied her savings after wholesale prices, which are typically as low as a couple of cents per kilowatthour, spiked to $9 per kilowatt-hour.

At $9 a kilowatt-hour, the average U.S. home would have a monthly electric bill of about $8,000.

“In a lot of respects, we’re victims of our own attempt to let free market forces work,” said Republican state Rep. Drew Darby, who sits on the House Energy Resources Committee that is digging into the outages.

At least six board members of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s power grid, resigned this week ahead of likely calls for their ouster at the hearings.

President Joe Biden is set to fly to Texas on Friday, a trip that marks his first visit to a disaster site since taking office. Just weeks before the outages, Abbott had ordered state agencies to look for ways to sue the new administration over energy regulations that he said would hamper the state’s biggest industry.