Courtesy of Bastrop Advertiser
March 11, 2021
By Bill McCann
An Austin friend had part of a water-soaked ceiling slam onto his living room sofa in his apartment during the historic deep freeze that knocked out power to more than 4 million Texans in February. Luckily, he wasn’t sitting on the sofa at the time. His apartment complex lost power for days. With no heat, pipes froze, then burst in several places in the complex. The repair is taking weeks to complete.
My friend is one of thousands of stories of hardship and even death following the near-collapse of the state’s deregulated power grid. Many Texans continue to face expensive cleanup, repair and replacement from broken pipes and damaged buildings. The disaster’s cost could reach $90 billion in direct and indirect losses, one expert estimated.
Gov. Greg Abbott and other state political leaders immediately sought scapegoats. Abbott first blamed wind generators, but a major problem turned out to be natural gas-fueled power plants freezing up. Then, Abbott and others attacked the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s power grid. Abbott promised an investigation. And he talked about requiring Texas energy producers to winterize their facilities. Finally.
Several ERCOT board members resigned after news outlets reported they lived out of state. Two of the three-member Texas Public Utility Commission, the regulatory agency that oversees ERCOT, quit under fire, including the chairwoman. The governor appoints the PUC commissioners. Also, ERCOT’s chief executive officer got booted – with a reported $800,000 severance that he said he will not seek.
Republicans can’t blame Democrats, socialism or antifa this time. This disaster happened on your watch, Governor Abbott. You and the rest of the Republican leadership in Texas and those who keep voting you into office own it.
Republicans have held the Texas governorship since George W. Bush won in 1994. They won control of the Texas Senate in 1996 and the House in 2002. Every member of the Texas Railroad Commission elected since 1994 has been a Republican. The Railroad Commission is supposed to regulate the state’s oil and gas industry. You wouldn’t have known it by listening to the commission’s chair Christi Craddick speak at a legislative hearing last week. She sometimes sounded like she worked for the industry not as its regulator.
Following blackouts caused by frigid weather in Texas in 2011, a federal government report warned that many Texas power generators and natural gas producers had not adequately winterized their facilities. The report cited a 1989 cold spell that also forced generators offline. Republican leaders and state regulators failed to require energy companies to winterize after the 1989 and 2011 incidents. They basically left it to the industry. Regulation is a naughty word in the GOP vocabulary. Last month’s blackout put an exclamation point on their failure.
The Washington Post reported last week that many Texas power plants that failed in 2011 also failed in February’s freeze. The Post found that problems occurred at least partly because plant owners did not make the needed upgrades to protect those plants from the cold. Neither the companies nor the wimpy regulators had learned their lesson.
A Feb. 22 investigative article by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune highlights examples in which Texas lawmakers and state regulators “repeatedly ignored, dismissed or watered down efforts to address weaknesses in the state’s sprawling electric grid, which is isolated from the rest of the country.”
Albert Einstein gets credit for saying the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. Texans who keep voting for Republicans who care more about corporations than protecting people should remember Einstein’s statement when they vote in 2022. Otherwise, if they shiver in the dark without water in the next big freeze, they won’t have anyone to blame but themselves.
