Is Texas the land of opportunity if the grid fails?
To hear Gov. Greg Abbott tell it, Texas' utopian business environment was practically Manifest Destiny. Abbott spun this tale in March to a room full of C-Suite executives with earnest folksiness and florid language, as if the iconic Lady Columbia herself had snipped the red tape while guiding business owners to a western sancturary free from regulation and standard taxation.
“The spirit of Texas — rooted in rugged individualism, freedom, and personal responsibility — makes the Lone Star State exceptional in every way,” Abbott said during a discussion hosted by the Texas Economic Development Corporation. “From education, agriculture, space, technology, and more, Texas offers everything families, growing businesses, and individuals need to succeed.”
Everything, apparently, except reliable electricity. And quality schools. And clean air. And adequate access to health care. And, we digress.
We do wonder, though, if the power grid's latest convulsion this month gave second thoughts to any of those out-of-town CEOs enamored with Abbott's version of Texas exceptionalism.
After all, we couldn't even make it to the summer solstice before ERCOT, the nonprofit that operates the grid, asked Texans last week to keep their thermostats at or above 78 degrees and avoid running the dishwasher or the washer and dryer before sundown. Six power generators failed amid unseasonably hot weather, knocking offline about 2,900 megawatts of generating capacity. That's enough to power 580,000 homes on a hot day. On Monday, ERCOT told legacy power generators they would again need to defer planned outages for maintenance and keep producing power to keep the lights on across the state. Such mandates may be necessary, amid surging demand for electricity, but they are also a lot like a mechanic telling the owner of a car with 200,000 miles to put off an oil change before a long road trip.
If you're exasperated by yet another threat to the grid before we've even reached regular tripledigit temperatures, we don't blame you. We, too, were left feeling less than reassured when Peter Lake, the chairman of the Public Utility Commission, insisted Tuesday that “the lights will stay on this summer.”
That rather ominous assurance is alarming in the short-term, particularly when a report released by ERCOT last week predicted this summer's power demand would shatter previous records. While ERCOT officials say there will be more than enough megawatts available to keep air conditioners whirring, their assessment relies on rosy assumptions. Chief among them? That events such as the 2011 heat wave and Winter Storm Uri, which left millions without power and hundreds dead, are mere anomalies unlikely to be repeated anytime soon.
“The idea that a heatwave from 11 years ago is the worst possible weather that we might experience this summer in a warming climate is fooling ourselves,” Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, told the editorial board. “They portray their extreme risk scenarios as very low likelihood of happening but there's no real analysis showing that.”
Scanning weather patterns across the globe provides a glimpse at just how deadly hot the summer months could get. Temperatures in New Delhi hit 116 degrees last week and nearly 124 degrees in Jacobabad, Pakistan. It may be only May, but the mercury hit 99 degrees twice this past week in Austin, and 97 three other days. Yet Abbott and too many other leaders in Texas refuse to even acknowledge climate change is making weather more dangerous in Texas. That's a perilous oversight.
Texas is promising the world, and especially the business leaders it wants to attract, that we're ready to welcome new factories, new workers and new families. And yet the state's booming population — Texas gained more than 300,000 residents between 2020 and 2021 — and the arrival of companies such as Oracle, Tesla, and Apple will further strain the grid. So will cryptocurrency miners who are flocking to Texas. Some estimate that by the end of 2022, companies on the state's grid will account for roughly 20 percent of the entire global Bitcoin network. The sheer volume of power required to meet that crypto influx is almost unfathomable — these miners will need twice as much energy as the amount the entire city of Austin consumed in 2020.
The state should welcome newcomers, as Abbott has, but it also must ensure the reliability of resources they and everybody already here will need — the grid, yes, but also our water supply, our schools, and our health care, to cite just three. If we're not ready, then the sunny business climate that Abbott brags about may turn cloudy much sooner than he expects.
Abbott's pro-business message is being undercut in other ways, too. He and other Republican officials continue to demonize transgender children and undocumented immigrants, setting a miserable example for basic human decency. When our state ranks higher in the number of books banned than it does for educational opportunities, that's hardly a selling point to executives considering where to locate their workforce. Nor is air quality that is so dismal, the EPA is considering reclassifying both the Dallas and Houston metro areas as “severe” violators of 2008 federal ozone pollution standards.
Yes, low cost of business is a big draw for companies looking to relocate their operations. But so is confidence that moving here will mean clean air, steady power, and quality schools and healthcare, for instance. If Abbott plans to keep rolling out the welcome mat, he must also spend both more political capital and tax dollars to shore up our sagging social and physical infrastructure. Low tax bills are nice but they won't keep the lights on.
Shaky power system undercuts Abbott’s pro-business message.