Legislators call for boost in fossil fuels
Republicans singling out renewables in power grid crisis called disingenuous
With millions of Texans having lost power during the winter storms, key players in the Legislature say one of the most immediate reforms they will push for is recalibrating the state’s electricity grid to ensure more fossil fuels are in that mix and fewer renewables.
While all energy sources were disrupted during the historic freeze, Republican lawmakers who control the Legislature say renewables have been given all the attention over the years, yet proved to be unhelpful during the state’s crisis.
“It’s cool to be into wind and solar these days, but the problem is it leaves us frigid in the winter,” said Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who leads the GOP caucus in the Texas Senate.
Officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said most of the generating plants that went offline this week were natural gas, coal or nuclear facilities. But still, Republicans have singled out wind and solar as targets over the objections of Democrats and renewable energy advocates.
Texas utilities ratepayers have funded more than $7 billion over the last eight years building transmission lines to take wind power from West Texas to the big cities. It’s made Texas the biggest wind producer in the nation.
But Bettencourt and other Republicans say advantages like federal subsidies for wind and solar have to be evened out.
“We need a baseload energy generation strategy in Texas that is reliable and not based upon renewables so strongly,” he said.
State Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, this week reupped a bill he filed last
session that would require ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission to write rules that would “eliminate or compensate for market distortion caused by certain federal tax credits.”
“It’s not just the frozen wind turbines; it’s the fact that they even exist that is creating the problem,” said Patterson, who works as an energy consultant. “Their existence, their heavily subsidized existence on our grid is creating a shortage of energy supply because no one else can compete against them.”
The previous version of the bill was downsized into one that would have required a study of market distortion. It died in committee. But this year Patterson says he expects there will be heightened interest, plus he now sits on the calendars committee that picks which bills make it to the House floor.
Hearings set
Gov. Greg Abbott hinted at a similar approach in an interview on FOX News earlier this week when he made clear that he believes clean energy sources are unreliable in winter — though other states can keep wind turbines operating because the equipment is weatherized to handle cold weather, unlike in Texas.
“It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure that we will be able to heat our homes in the wintertime and cool our homes in the summertime,” Abbott said.
State Sen. Kelly Hancock, a North Texas Republican who leads the committee that will be investigating the power outages, has spent part of the week celebrating the work thermal energy sources have been doing to make up for failures in renewables.
Hancock is chair of the Senate Business and Commerce Committee, which will hold its hearing on Feb. 25.
Blaming renewables is misguided and politically motivated, said Adrian Shelley, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.
“There is no energy source that doesn’t receive subsidies,” Shelley said. “There have been energy tax credits for fossil fuel sources for a hundred years, so to target the renewable tax credit … it’s pretty disingenuous.”
Both the Texas Senate and House have scheduled hearings starting next week on what caused so many Texans to be left in frigid temperatures without power. Already, lawmakers say they have a lot of questions about ERCOT, the nongovernmental group that manages the state’s power grid.
Abbott has called for the leadership of ERCOT to resign.
State Sen. Carol Alvarado, DHouston, is among those questioning why ERCOT has board members who do not live in Texas. The chair of ERCOT lives in Michigan and the vice chair in Germany.
“I am concerned that they failed to fully consider the impact of their decisions to cut power to vulnerable Texans,” Alvarado said in a letter to the chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which has oversight over ERCOT.
Abbott slammed ERCOT officials for poor communication during the entire crisis. He said they were not transparent and not providing information to the public or to elected officials including himself.
State Sen. Joan Huffman, RFort Bend, says she will schedule hearings to dig into the reaction from ERCOT and the Public Utilities Commission.
“I look forward to the opportunity to ask direct questions to the leaders of these entities in a public forum, because the people of Texas deserve answers and this committee will demand them,” Huffman said.
But while there may be reforms to ERCOT, not many Republicans are talking about the prospect of ordering the state’s nearly 700 power plants to invest in weatherization and what that would cost.
ERCOT officials said earlier this week in a statewide news conference that while it was recommended power plants weatherize after winter storms in 2011 knocked out power, those were voluntary requests and not mandatory.
‘Happy medium’
State Rep. Jon Rosenthal, a Houston Democrat and senior mechanical engineer in the oil and gas industry, said he is working on legislation that would build in more reserve energy supply for Texas, such as by hooking up the state to the nationally interconnected system, or offering financial incentives for providers to increase backup power.
Rosenthal would also like to see reliability standards introduced that require generators to weatherize their systems. He said he knows that adding more regulations will be an uphill battle in the Republican-majority Legislature but believes there is a “happy medium” that can be struck.
“While the common argument ‘we don’t want regulation so we can provide electricity as cheaply as possible’ does provide cheap energy a lot of the time, these disasters are horrendously expensive,” Rosenthal said. “I’ve heard insurance folks saying this could be the costliest ever natural disaster in Texas. So you make a little bit of an investment in your infrastructure to ensure that you don’t have these disastrous consequences.”
He added: “And it’s not just the cost of it. It’s the human suffering.”
Bettencourt, who himself has
been without power much of the week, said he is focused on making sure that enough energy is coming from thermal sources in winter to prevent a repeat of what Texas has just gone through.
While Texas has been the nation’s No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas, it’s also been lauded for decommissioning coal-powered electricity sources and turning more and more to cheaper renewable sources like wind and solar. Most of the state’s facilities are natural gas, coal and nuclear.
Dan Woodfin, a senior director at ERCOT, said earlier this week that one of the hardest-hit energy supplies has been natural gas.
“It appears that a lot of the generation that has gone offline today has been primarily due to issues on the natural gas system,” he said.