The Texas energy mess needs a czar to take charge of situation

The polar vortex that incapacitated much of the electric grid in Texas is gone, but the financial vortex is happening now in the state and will be around for years, if not decades.

The spot price of electricity in Texas during the crisis days reached $9,000-a-megawatthour, up from around $35-amegawatt-hour.

Farmers are ruined, businesses large and small are ruined or very badly hurt, and the electricity generators of Texas are in extremis. Some of them, like Austin, Brownsville and San Antonio, are owned by the cities where they are located. Those cities must now find the money to keep their utilities operating without dragging down city finances.

The damage extends across the wide range of electricity generators in Texas. Nearly all are in dire straits, some owing billions.

This isn’t just a Texas crisis, but a crisis for the whole nation. It will reverberate across America in higher food prices and a new interest in the resilience of the electric grid, mandating big expenditures to harden it everywhere. What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas, you might say.

The main problem was with gas: lines, instruments and pumps froze. Abbott modified his utterances later and turned instead to lambasting the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) for its failures.

Texas is a proud state that loves the legend of white-hatted men on horses, riding to the rescue.

Well, there is such a man, whom the governor would do well to call upon. He is Pat

Wood III, a Texan through and through with unique qualifications for the job of crisis czar in his native state.

Wood is a Republican and former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the PUCT. At the FERC, Wood moved swiftly, as its new chairman in 2001, to resolve the electricity crisis in California, following the Enron scandal. Appointed to the FERC by fellow Texan George W. Bush, Wood garnered praise across the political spectrum and the utility industry for his actions.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. He wrote this for Insidesources.com.