California, don’t mess with freezing Texas

When a record-breaking “heat storm” in August forced California’s electrical grid operator to cut power to millions of people over the course of two miserable days, lawmakers in Texas had a field day mocking their Democrat-dominated rival for failing to keep the lights on when it got a little hot.

See, they chortled, this is what the liberal tree-hugging rush to renewable energy gets you. Of course, the cause of the rolling blackouts was much more complicated than an overreliance on renewables, though that was certainly a factor. You can’t undergo a major shift in power generation without some stumbles.

Now Texans are in a similar, albeit much more serious, situation with more than 4 million homes and businesses left without power for days during the coldest weather in a century. And Californians may be inclined to feel a bit smug. How are those fossil fuels working out for you now?

But the reality is that neither state can claim bragging rights about the reliability of its electrical grid. As much as Californians and Texans like to tout their vast political differences, when it comes to providing power to their people they are both failing — and for many of the same reasons.

The two states have very different energy goals and approaches. California is on the path toward getting 100% of its power from the sun, wind or other renewable energy sources by 2045. Texas unapologetically embraces fossil fuels, even though it is a leader in wind-produced energy.

But the fundamentals of their power grids are similar. Both states deregulated their grids two decades ago, though to different degrees, and put them under control of independent agencies that enjoy little public oversight. Both states participate in competitive energy markets that move power around in ways that are not always in the public’s best interest. Both have failed to require their utilities to properly prepare for the stresses of extreme weather. Both lack facilities to store surplus power — solar in California and natural gas in Texas.

And both ignored warnings that blackouts were imminent without action.

Texas even had a preview of how last week’s breakdown might unfold. In 2011, another arctic front descended on Texas and neighboring states. After this, federal regulators made a series of recommendations to avoid a repeat, such as weatherizing plants and insulating pipelines. If those recommendations had been followed, the grid’s problems last week may have been less severe.

California’s electrical grid operator also had fair warning of how the August heat wave could overwhelm its systems. In fact, it had warned lawmakers about that exact scenario a year earlier.

And there’s one final similarity. Each state’s ratepayers will foot the bill for these structural failures, paying in both misery and money.

Residents of both states should hold their elected officials’ feet to the fire to fix those problems before the next “once-in-a-lifetime” extreme weather event throws them, powerless, into the dark.