Texans left out in the cold by leaders
Take heart, Texans: Gov. Greg Abbott has noticed that it’s been a tough few days for you and your family.
“The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours,” Abbott said in a statement Tuesday, announcing that he had decided to list ERCOT reform as one of his emergency items for this year’s legislative session, which began in January.
“Far too many Texans are without power and heat for their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and severe winter weather,” he continued. “This is unacceptable.”
Indeed. At the time, more than 4 million households across Texas were without power, heat or recourse in the wake of the winter storm that blanketed the state Sunday, driving Houston temperatures into the teens. We were warned to expect rolling blackouts, starting Sunday night, along with a light smattering of snow in the region. What we got was something far more serious, with more than a dozen people dying in weather-related circumstances in the Houston area alone.
“These are not rolling blackouts,” tweeted Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner Monday morning, as the scope of the problem was becoming clear. “We are dealing with system-wide power outages across the state.”
And in the energy capital of the world, no less. If not for the frigid temperatures, our cheeks
would be burning with shame.
As the day wore on, we got an explanation, sort of, for what was happening. The extreme cold, which drove a surge in consumer demand for power, also resulted in large-scale generation problems. The result was that ERCOT — which manages the flow of power for the state’s electric grid — ordered providers to shed load in a dramatic fashion, in order to keep critical load circuits online.
But such an explanation raises as many questions as it answers. This was, as Turner swiftly noted, a systemwide problem — and a statewide one. Despite some early efforts to breezily pin the problem on wind turbines, some of which had frozen over and therefore stopped spinning, it became evident that wind power going offline represented a relatively small share of the generation shortfall. And while it’s true, and to be expected, that the state grid is better equipped to handle extreme heat than extreme cold, it’s not as if the leaders of ERCOT couldn’t anticipate the occasional bout of genuine winter weather, or plan accordingly.
Why didn’t we? Texas is the only state to have its own grid, which covers much of the state and roughly 90 percent of its population — an arrangement devised in part to elude the bureaucrats of the federal government and the regulations they often wield. Perhaps we should revisit that idea, and perhaps we will, now that Abbott has listed ERCOT reform as an emergency item.
Lawmakers of both parties, many of them shivering, have called for answers, action, and some form of accountability. And Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican from Beaumont, on Tuesday morning announced a joint committee hearing to be held next month to examine the fiasco.
What was Abbott doing, as this crisis unfolded? That’s a question that may not have occurred to you Monday. You may well have been preoccupied with more pressing concerns. Like wrapping your water pipes in warm towels. Scrambling to book a hotel room for an elderly relative in a different city. Huddling under a pile of blankets, eating a sleeve of stale Saltines.
“I have gathered information all day from ERCOT and the Public Utilities Comm. & will provide a detailed update shortly,” Abbott tweeted Monday afternoon.
Several hours later, the governor revealed the fruits of his labor. He tweeted a screen-cap of a press release issued by ERCOT earlier in the day, explaining that “extreme weather conditions caused many generating units — across fuel types — to trip offline and become unavailable.”
Rather than holding a press conference that day, Abbott called in to a series of local broadcast affiliates Monday evening to get his message out — to the subset of Texans who still had access to television, needless to say.
“The people who have fallen short with regard to the power are the private power generation companies,” Abbott told ABC13.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was also virtually invisible Monday. Perhaps he exhausted himself during the great Star-Spangled Banner Wars of last week, which began when it was reported that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban had, for whatever reason, decided not to play the national anthem at the beginning of this season’s home games.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat how angry and incredibly frustrated I am with the state-wide power outages, because many of those suffering Texans are Harris County Precinct 2 residents,” County Commissioner Adrian Garcia said in a statement Tuesday. “Making things worse, we are not receiving much communication from state authorities to inform us of how they plan to fix the problems, nor when people should expect to have their power back.”
Such a failure of communication is every bit as unacceptable as the power failures themselves.
Addressing the latter is, of course, the most urgent priority facing the state. But we can’t be an functional state, much less a semi-independent one, without effective statewide leadership — the absence of which has left Texans in the cold this week, both literally and figuratively.