Governor, get serious. People are dying.
Electric grid, whole industry need the kind of leadership Texas has lacked for years.
Texans shivering in the dark are facing many shortages right now — lights, heat, tap water, gasoline — but the most vexing deficit is a critical shortage of leadership in Austin.
Consider: As a massive cold front barreled down on the state Saturday, Gov. Greg Abbott was busy on Twitter mocking police reform in another state and sharing a photo of an improvised Whataburger cup. “Here is how one Texan is protecting his outdoor faucet from the cold winter weather,” he wrote. “@Whataburger of course.”
A day earlier, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo warned residents in the starkest terms to take the storm seriously: “We’re about to see an incident the likes of which we have not seen in 30 years,” she said, telling residents to prepare for conditions similar to “a category 5 hurricane.”
Two leaders, two responses to the same crisis. One was singularly focused on keeping people safe. The other issued a routine disaster declaration and then went back to business as usual: folksy Texas bull and partisan politics.
It’s an approach far too common among Texas governors. And once again, it’s costing lives. The death toll in this devastating storm that has left millions without power is climbing, with more than a dozen weather-related deaths reported in the Houston area alone.
You’d think the deep misery of millions of Texans — never mind the global embarrassment of seeing the nation’s energy capital on its knees — would have forced Abbott to face up to the reality of the state he leads. But instead, he chose to play more games — political games. On Tuesday, he was on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, blaming the energy grid’s collapse on frozen wind turbines.
“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” he said. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.”
As deceptive as a deadly patch of black ice.
This disaster has nothing to do with the Green New Deal. Wind makes up a tiny fraction of the state’s energy grid this time of year. The vast majority of power sources knocked off line were natural gas and coal, largely because those facilities weren’t properly weatherized.
The real problem, as Abbott knows, has to do with Texas’ loosely regulated grid and a system of energy delivery that tries to maximize profits and keep consumer prices cheap by failing to insure against a crisis like this one.
Naturally, Abbott had plenty of company spreading his falsehoods, from U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw to former Gov. Rick Perry, who ludicrously suggested that the fatal power outages were a small price to pay for Texas not being subjected to federal regulations.
What Texans need right now is help in getting the lights back on, and the water flowing, and in making sure they and their families are safe. But they also are looking for leadership from those elected to provide it. They aren’t getting it — and it’s times like these, and before that, the coronavirus pandemic, when the familiar litany of failures on the part of Abbott and other officeholders turns deadly.
Failed to act
Abbott has made reforming the state’s power grid manager, a non-profit called ERCOT, a legislative priority and House Speaker Dade Phelan called on two key committees to meet jointly next week to “understand what went wrong.” These are important next steps — but only if the lawmakers and the governor demand real reform, and actually bother to find out what is really broken.
Another thing Abbott forgot to tell Hannity? Texas officials knew the grid was vulnerable to collapse and failed to act.
Ten years ago, the Legislature tried to reform ERCO T and didn’t get far. A series of rolling blackouts following a freak ice storm in North Texas during Super Bowl week had lawmakers hopping mad over the grid’s operators to prepare for extreme weather. Lucky for them, 2011 was also the year ERCOT was undergoing review by the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission for the first — and so far, only — time since it was created.
The commission urged a series of reforms, noting that ERCOT lacked legislative and financial oversight to ensure accountability and that its board and advisory committee structure did not provide needed objectivity.
The Senate passed a bill containing those reforms. Sen. John Whitmire, DHouston, was a member of the commission and said he recalls Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, on the floor offering consumer-oriented amendments one after another — and all of them failed. When the surviving bill got to the House, it was left pending in a committee.
“ERCOT is still largely controlled by the industry,” Whitmire marveled Wednesday. “It’s a network of good ole boys. You’re not going to get people appointed there who are consumer advocates.”
But this week, he added, it’s been a convenient whipping boy for politicians on the left and right. ERCOT needs reforms, he said, but one person is already responsible for its failures.
“ERCOT answers to the Public Utility Commission, whose members are all appointed by the governor. The buck stops there — with the governor,” Whitmire said.
Tragically missing
For real reform to happen, leaders like Abbott will have to recognize that the grand bargain Texas proudly offers to industries of all kinds — bring your companies here and we’ll offer low taxes, low costs and scant regulation — is one that needs serious rethinking. The benefits Texas receives from all those new jobs are big, but they do not come without costs. It’s just that those costs are usually harder to count — until something like this week happens.
“Regulators in Texas are very pro-industry,” Jim Krane, an energy fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, told the board Wednesday. “If the industry doesn't want to spend the money to do it, they seem to be pretty loath to force them to do something they don't want to do.”
There are many things ERCOT and its state overseers should require the Texas energy industry to do. Chief among them are making pipelines and wind turbines able to withstand intense cold, just as they do in the many other parts of the world. If drivers are required to have liability insurance, why shouldn’t energy generators be required to have a kind insurance of their own, against extreme weather or other foreseeable, if rare, crises.
"In Texas, if you have one overarching thing that seems to be across the board is that nothing is winterized,” Krane said. “All these technologies work fine, absolutely fine in cold places. It's just that not one of those precautions has been instituted in Texas.”
Companies probably considered investing in protecting their infrastructure from extreme cold an imprudent expense. Now that those decisions have helped plunge millions of Texans into deadly misery, it’s time for the state’s leaders to decide that oughtn’t be up to the companies.
But to do that, we’ll need a kind of leadership from Abbott and top legislative leaders that’s been tragically missing.