Crenshaw, Turner clash over power grid
Congressman, mayor dispute winter storm issues, text messages during House hearing
Mayor Sylvester Turner and U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw clashed this week over Texas’ power grid, Houston’s use of renewable energy, and the congressman’s complaint that Turner wasn’t answering his text messages.
The exchange came toward the end of a House energy subcommittee hearing on last month’s winter storm and mass power outage, which Turner attributed to the failure of natural gas and coal plants — the energy sources that collectively supply about 64 percent of Texas’ generating capacity, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
“You cannot blame this on renewables. You absolutely cannot,” said Turner, a Democrat and former state representative, at the Wednesday hearing. “That’s a false issue.”
Later in the hearing, Crenshaw accused Democrats of presenting a “straw man argument” by saying that “Republicans are blaming wind,” though he characterized wind energy as “unreliable.”
Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, at one point told Fox News that frozen wind turbines were largely responsible for the energy grid’s collapse, drawing sharp criticism from Democrats and some experts.
Crenshaw also pushed back on an earlier claim from Turner that Houston’s municipal operations are fully powered by renewable energy.
“Mr. Mayor, your city facilities are not powered by renewables when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. They just aren’t,” said Crenshaw, a Republican whose 2nd Congressional District includes parts of Houston and its northern and western suburbs.
Houston, through a deal with
NRG Energy, buys roughly one million megawatt hours of renewable electricity each year. The electricity comes from a combination of renewable energy purchased by NRG, and so-called renewable energy certificates, a type of commodity that represents a megawatt hour of clean energy. The city also gets some of its energy through a power purchase agreement with a solar facility in west Texas.
During the hearing, Crenshaw also asked Turner to account for the failure of some of the diesel generators that power the city’s water purification plants, nearly 20 percent of which went offline during the storm.
“Do you think it’s the federal government’s responsibility to maintain those, or can you take responsibility for that?” Crenshaw asked.
Turner said he is “not asking the federal government to assume responsibility for generators that did not perform,” though he did not expand further on why the generators failed. He then pushed back against Crenshaw’s earlier claim that Texas’ energy market is “not some wild west free market” because wind and solar generators receive government subsidies.
“I voted to deregulate this market in 1999. So, generation is deregulated, our retail electric providers are deregulated. Transmission distribution is regulated. I’m quite familiar with—,” Turner said, before Crenshaw cut him off.
“Right, right, okay Mr. Mayor, I’ve given you enough time there,” Crenshaw said. “If you want to respond to me more, you can actually text me back every once in awhile. I’ve got a long list of non-responses from you on my phone.”
Before becoming mayor, Turner represented a northwest Houston district in the Texas House from 1989 until 2016. He served on the committee responsible for implementing Texas’ energy deregulation law in 1999, and later sought unsuccessfully to give regulators more power over electric pricing and to have utility companies refund ratepayers for their excess earnings, along with a slew of other electric-related bills.
Turner said Wednesday that Texas lawmakers must require power companies to “weatherize” their plants, instead of merely hoping they will use their profits to do so, to prevent similar disasters from happening again.
“The system that we have in Texas is a market-driven system, and they were hoping that by allowing the power generators to increase their charges per megawatt over the last 10 years, that they would have built in resilience into their system,” Turner said. “That did not happen.”
Crenshaw, elected to Congress in 2018, has become one of the more prominent House members in the country, frequently sparring with Democrats on Twitter. The former Navy SEAL and war veteran sided with Turner last year when the mayor called off the in-person Texas Republican Convention in Houston, calling it a “prudent move” even as other Republicans blasted the mayor.
In the wake of the storm, Crenshaw has criticized renewable energy sources, arguing that the outages would have been even worse had Texas’ grid been “more reliant on the wind turbines that froze” during the storm.
“This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source,” Crenshaw tweeted last month during the storm. “When weather conditions get bad as they did this week, intermittent renewable energy like wind isn’t there when you need it.”
Experts have said both wind turbines and natural gas plants can be winterized, or modified so they can continue operating during cold weather.