Answers on outages

Legislature must look deeper into why the system it created failed to keep the power on.

The completely preventable, man-made tragedy of last week’s power failure that has now claimed dozens of Texas lives — young and old, but mostly lower-income people who couldn’t afford to escape to Cancun — was a colossal failure of Texas government, including the people who lead it and the people who make the laws. They had one job above all others: to ensure basic services that sustain our civilization, our economy and life itself.

This morning, committees in both houses of the Texas Legislature will hear testimony about what went wrong, and how Texas failed so catastrophically to keep the lights, heat and water on for millions of residents as freezing temperatures turned deadly.

It was an unusually severe winter storm for Texas, but Mother Nature was not the author of last week’s misery . Nor, despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s best attempts to imply otherwise, was it the sole fault of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the nonprofit manager of Texas’ power grid. And it wasn’t wind and solar, no matter how many times state officials cite renewable energy as a convenient scapegoat.

Remember Texas leaders’ gross neglect of duty when you when you think of Cristian Pavon Paneda, the 11-year-old Conroe boy who authorities suspect froze to death in his sleep, despite his mother piling blankets on top of him in a desperate bid to protect him with no power in their mobile home. Or Carrol Anderson, the Crosby man who died in his truck when the power outage shut off the oxygen machine in the house, and he went outside to use the only tank he had left to help him breathe. Or Loan Le, 51, the Sugar Land women who died along with three grandchildren — Olivia, 11, Edison, 8, and Colette Nguyen, 5 — in a house fire that may have been started by the flame they lit in the fireplace to keep warm.

In each case, and scores more, the thing they lacked was electricity. In a state famous for its abundance of energy, and energy know-how, the fact that this precious resource could suddenly vanish from people’s homes and businesses across hundreds of miles is a deep shame — and an indictment of a system of governance that prizes cheap over safe, deregulation over reliability, industry profits over life.

Texas lawmakers who created this system, the Public Utility Commission that oversees it, and the governor who appoints the commission’s board, cannot undo the death, the suffering or the billions in damage.

All they can do is answer for it — and take the strongest steps possible to make sure it never happens again. That should be a given. But in Texas, where our leaders failed to act after previous failures in 1989 and again in 2011, we have learned not to trust.

Unless we Texans demand accountability from our elected leaders, stay engaged until it happens, and track progress this legislative session on reforms, nothing will change. Inertia and the influence of industry lobbyists are powerful. But your calls and emails to lawmakers, your sharing of news coverage, your posts on social media — and yes, the threat of losing your vote — are more powerful still.

Desperately needed scrutiny begins this morning in Austin at 9 a.m. In the House, meeting in the largest committee room available, members of the committees on energy resources and state affairs will hold a joint meeting. In the Senate, the business and commerce committee meets.

Among the witnesses invited to testify: representatives from power companies, grid operators, and the retail delivery companies such as CenterPoint Energy in the Houston region and Oncor in North Texas, leaders of ERCOT and PUC commissioners appointed by Abbott.

We urge lawmakers to focus on three priorities.

Scrutinize but don’t scapegoat

Yes, we must know what mistakes ERCOT made in the days before it assured Texans it was prepared for the highly anticipated polar vortex. What about the days that followed as ice knocked offline one source of power after another? Its leaders, and its board members — five of whom announced resignations Tuesday amid withering criticism from Abbott — must be held accountable.A decade ago, the Sunset Advisory Commission recommended enhanced state oversight of ERCOT and reforms to make its board more independent of energy firms that contribute to the grid it manages. Lawmakers who failed to make those changes have another chance.

Yet, it’s still unclear how significantly ERCOT, the grid’s traffic cop, contributed to the crisis. Texans need to know: how much authority did ERCOT truly have to ensure reliability and how much is the little-known entity being used as a scapegoat by Abbott and others?

Modernize the grid

Lacking winterization seems to have been at the root of generators’ failure to produce the power needed during the winter storm. We’re glad to see Abbott call for long-overdue state requirements to insulate and protect facilities, pipelines, wind turbines and other critical infrastructure. Lawmakers cannot let the previous sticking point — who will pay for the required upgrades? — hinder their passage. Other, much colder, states have found a way. Texas must as well.

Eyes on the big picture

Lawmakers can’t afford to get so mired in the details that they forget to ask the big questions.

Texas credits a low cost of living and low-regulatory climate for luring thousands of jobs in the past two decades. But we need some bold politician to ask: has deregulation in fact lowered Texas energy costs? There’s evidence to suggest it hasn’t. But if so, are the savings worth the tradeoffs we just lived through?

We say no. Texas must find a way to ensure affordability without sacrificing reliability. Any added cost to consumers, most likely slight, could never come close the toll we just paid.

Lawmakers, ask questions. Demand answers. And then require of yourselves what your predecessors refused to deliver: a solution.