San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Abbott adviser at ERCOT site amid debacle
Gov. Greg Abbott dispatched a top aide to the ERCOT operations center on the night the grid operator made the decision to leave electricity prices at maximum levels — a move blamed for creating a multibillion-dollar mess.
Abbott has placed the blame for the blackout boondoggle on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the power grid, and he called for its CEO to resign right after the lights started coming back on across Texas on Thursday, Feb. 18. The ERCOT board eventually fired the CEO.
Unmentioned while Abbott was distancing himself from the power outage fiasco and railing against ERCOT on TV: A top energy policy adviser, Ryland Ramos, spent the previous night — and into early Thursday morning — at the agency’s operations center in Taylor, outside Austin. That’s where ERCOT’s hightech control room, handling the flow of power to most Texans, is located.
Also on hand at the previously undisclosed meeting were Public Utility Commission Chair DeAnn Walker, an Abbott appointee who later resigned under bipartisan pressure, along with representatives of four of the major electric transmission and distribution companies in Texas.
Ramos returned to the operations center Friday morning, Feb. 19 — right after the price cap was lifted — and stayed there most of the day, according to ERCOT visitor logs obtained by Hearst Newspapers.
Abbott spokesman Mark
washboard road leading into the space-centric campground near the site of the Civil War’s Battle of Palmito Ranch.
After battling crowds for the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy ship from Cape Canaveral, Fla., Rocket Ranch owner David Santilena thought there had to be a better way to watch blastoffs.
So the resident of Kingwood bought 10½ acres with a ranch house on the banks of the Rio Grande in January 2020. In less than a year, he created a campsite complete with vintage trailers for rent, a fishing dock, family-style meals, bonfires and a laid-back vibe.
The ranch house is now a community area. Its walls are adorned with space memorabilia, including chunks of ill-fated Starships.
“Everybody’s interested in Elon and SpaceX and everything, so the conversations are good, and there’s some super smart people that come through here,” Santilena said. “Scientists and people that have knowledge of all different things, you know, and everybody’s kind of an intellectual, and they want to talk about it.”
Guests can book a seat on the ranch’s pontoon boat for $350 to watch a launch from a special viewing area on the Rio Grande.
“Each launch is getting more and more popular, so this place is just kind of running away on its own,” Santilena said.
Brownsville
On March 30, a Starship exploded and rained stainless steel and rocket parts across the Boca Chica marshes. About an hour after the blowup, Musk tweeted that he was donating $30 million to Cameron County schools and the city of Brownsville.
The announcement caught Brownsville Mayor Trey Mendez off guard.
“I just heard about it at the same time everybody else did,” he said. “You know, Mr. Musk likes to move quickly, and he can be impulsive at times, and his tweets have worldwide effects.”
The city is working with the Elon Musk Foundation and developing a plan for the funds. Local school districts are already receiving checks.
Mendez sees SpaceX as a boost for his community, which has had a rough year with COVID-19 and February’s winter storm. Cameron County, with a population of 423,000 as of 2019, has had nearly 40,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 1,600 deaths from the disease.
SpaceX has “been a real positive when it comes to the economic impact they’ve had on our community,” Mendez said.
He also highlighted a real estate boom fueled in part by Musk’s March 30 tweet calling for people to move to the Brownsville area because SpaceX is hiring. Starbase will grow to “several thousand people over the next year or two,” he said.
“Home prices have been going up,” Mendez said. “I’ve met quite a few people that have moved down here lately.”
Despite the goodwill, a halfdozen community members spoke out against SpaceX at the Brownsville City Commission meeting April 6.
“SpaceX wasn’t really on my radar until they started cranking up their operations and, you know, breaking rockets,” said Chris Sandoval, a high school physics teacher and one of those who spoke out. He’s concerned about environmental, economic and civic consequences According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates, debris from the late March explosion traveled 1,100 yards into federally managed land. Currently, huge pieces of the rocket remain lodged in a marsh as the Federal Aviation Administration continues to investigate the explosion.
And while the Starbase name itself doesn’t bother Sandoval, he sees it as an act of colonization that downplays the area’s native history.
“Not that Boca Chica was the original name of the area,” he said. The Carrizo Comecrudo people are indigenous to the region, and “they are absolutely not given the opportunity to offer their input for the original names of the places around the Valley.”
Sandoval and other activists also say the company isn’t hiring many local workers — though Mendez said the majority of the facility’s 1,400 employees live in the area.
Another activist, Bekah Hinojosa, has distributed 50 yard signs and several hundred stickers challenging SpaceX, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the border wall and liquefied natural gas development.
“SpaceX colonization of Mars is starting to impact the Rio Grande Valley,” she said. “It’s stripping away our access to our pristine beach, gentrifying our community and causing devastating explosions.”
The mayor has little patience for the smoldering opposition to SpaceX. He called the public comments at the commissioner’s meeting and ongoing criticism “just ridiculous.”
“I think it’s a bunch of people that are upset about certain things. … But I don’t think they understand the big picture, and I don’t think they understand everything that’s happening and the real big impact that’s occurring,” he said.
“I certainly understand their concerns, and I don’t want to dismiss their concerns,” he said. “But I do think that some of them are misplaced.”
A few blocks from a house with some of Hinojosa’s yard signs, Alexandro Gonzalez-Hernandez was hard at work on a ladder, spray-painting the finishing touches on a mural on the front wall of an old Brownsville building.
The words “Boca Chica to Mars” frame a portrait of a smiling Musk. Mars hangs in the corner.
Gonzalez-Hernandez, who’s painted 60 murals across the Valley, joked that Musk is “my uncle.”
“I hope he sees it,” he said. “I want to inspire other artists and give them that little push.”
The mural is part of a pop-up exhibit featuring local photographers’ SpaceX and Starship art opening next Saturday.
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Diane Milliken Garza, a nonprofit consultant directing the art exhibit, sees it as a critical step in revitalizing Brownsville’s downtown.
“It’s like a ghost town compared to what it normally is, and there’s a lot of people that are dedicated to bringing it back,” she said. “And I feel like if we don’t get up and do it — and right now with SpaceX and Elon Musk realizing the same thing — we’ll never get this chance again ever.”
Boca Chica Beach
In the afternoon light of April 19, a Brownsville family wrapped up their Boca Chica beach day celebration of 16-year-old Brianna Chavez’s birthday.
Jesus Chavez, Brianna’s father, manned the grill barbecuing beef fajitas and chicken. Cousins Andrea Gonzalez, 4, and Allison Chavez, 8, splashed in the surf.
“We come here every weekend and we barbecue, that’s what we do here in Brownsville,” Chavez said. “Now we have to accommodate and check the time. We called the (county judge’s) office today to make sure that it’s open.”
In addition to closures for tests and launches, SpaceX often closes Texas 4 when moving equipment or rockets. The highway is the only way to the beach, and SpaceX needs county permission to close the road.
Despite publishing expected closures, the schedules often change. Even after checking, the family got hung up in a 40-minute delay on the highway as SpaceX moved a giant crane.
But the family didn’t let the delay dampen their party.
Boca Chica Beach is “a national treasure — there’s nothing like it,” said Emma Gonzalez, Jesus Chavez’s sister-in-law.
“Before, we never had to wait. It was just a straight shot from Brownsville,” she said. “I’m not for SpaceX, I’m sorry.”
As the family packed their vehicles and prepared to head home, the constant activity continued at the launch site. A sense of inevitability — like ocean waves or the onshore breeze — permeated the air.
Welders’ sparks flashed and heavy equipment rolled. A small group of visitors stood together across the highway from Starship SN15. They stared at the craft, snapped some photos and imagined it roaring toward the darkness.
A few miles down the road, in Boca Chica, Rosemarie Workman’s “Come and Take It” flag continued to fly.
Miner said neither the governor nor Ramos was “involved in any way” in the decision to keep prices at the maximum, which contributed to bankruptcies and billions of dollars in losses that will affect the Texas economy for years.
He said Abbott wanted Ramos at the operations center because he felt ERCOT was spewing “disinformation” about the crisis.
Ramos was “in the room relaying information in real time,” Miner said. “These individuals were working the phones and scrambling to get power back on and keep it on.”
The visitor logs show that Ramos and Walker, along with top regulatory officials from Centerpoint Energy, Oncor, AEP and Texas-New Mexico Power Co. — signed in about 10 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 17, and stayed there until 8:49 a.m. the next day. Cots were made available for those who needed to rest as the night wore on, officials said.
The timeline in the visitor logs means the Abbott aide was on the scene when ERCOT decided — just before midnight Wednesday — to quit ordering rolling power outages and then, in the wee hours of Thursday, leave the maximum prices for electricity in place.
Centerpoint declined comment and referred questions to ERCOT. ONCOR, the state’s largest transmission and distribution company, sent Liz Jones, vice president of regulatory affairs, to the operations center that night to help officials navigate the grid challenges and manage impacts in ONCOR’s service territory, said spokeswoman Kerri Dunn. AEP and Texas-New Mexico Power confirmed they sent representatives to attend the meeting.
Patrick Woodson, CEO of an electric retail provider that is going out of business after getting more than $65 million in bills it couldn’t pay because of the government-ordered price hikes, said the public deserves answers about how and why electricity prices stayed so high for so long — and who took part in the decisionmaking.
“There’s absolutely no justification whatsoever for prices to have been artificially inflated after the emergency conditions ended. That decision added billions of dollars of extra costs to the market,” Woodson said. “There needs to be a lot more light around how these decisions were made that led to such a massive transfer of wealth.”
$16 billion pricing error
Former utility regulator Arthur D’Andrea, who resigned after he was caught on tape reassuring Wall Street investors that he was working to protect the profits they made during the storm, told a Senate committee in March that ERCOT CEO Bill Magness had the utility commission chair’s blessing to leave the prices unchanged. He said that decision was made about 1:30 a.m. Thursday.
Magness told the same committee that he left the prices at the maximum level to ensure that generators had the proper incentives to keep the power flowing and to discourage big electricity users — loath to pay that much — from starting up operations that could potentially overload the grid and start rolling blackouts all over again.
“We needed the maximum incentive to keep every bit of generation on and to keep every bit of load off that was responding to price,” said Magness, whose last day leading ERCOT will be May 3. “And that seemed like the best course we had to assure that we would stay out of rotating outages.”
But the highly criticized decision to leave electricity prices at $9,000 per megawatt-hour for 32 hours after the outages stopped — 300 times higher than pre-storm prices — led to what an independent market monitor described as a $16 billion pricing error, along with $3 billion to $5 billion in unwarranted and potentially recoverable overcharges.
It also sparked a public rift between Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who pushed for a repricing bill aimed at undoing some of the damage that occurred over almost a day and a half. Under pressure from the lieutenant governor, seen as a potential Abbott rival, the governor suddenly gave the Legislature emergency powers to reprice but didn’t work the chambers to make it happen. At this point, the initiative is dead.
Miner said the ERCOT CEO was the one who made the pricing decision, but the Abbott spokesman said he was unable to answer whether Ramos was in the room at the time — or if he told the governor about it. Nor could Miner say whether Abbott supported the decision, then or now, to leave rates at the cap of $9,000 per megawatt-hour.
Refusing to release emails
Abbott has been unrelenting in his criticism of ERCOT, despite his perch at the top of the regulatory organization chart: His own appointees on the Public Utility Commission oversee every aspect of ERCOT, and all three of his commissioners who oversaw the storm response resigned amid the fury over blackouts that have made the top energy-producing state in America a national laughingstock.
Barely two days into the disaster, and just a day before dispatching his aide to the ERCOT Operations Center, the governor tweeted that he was ordering “an investigation into ERCOT and immediate transparency by ERCOT.”
About a month later, Abbott’s office refused to release emails, text messages and other communications that he and his aides — including Ramos, the one who spent the night at the grid operations center — exchanged with representatives of ERCOT and the PUC or that were otherwise related to the power outage and its aftermath.
In their denial of a public information request from Hearst Newspapers for those records, Abbott’s lawyers cited a number of reasons they should not be disclosed. They say the messages include privileged communications with attorneys, information about secret incentive packages potentially offered to companies willing to expand in Texas, and policy-related communications that, if released, would “have a chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process.”
ERCOT provided its visitor logs for the days that the storm was bearing down on Texas five days after Hearst requested them.