With millions of Texans losing power during winter storms, key Legislative participants say one of the most immediate reforms they will undertake is to recalibrate the state’s electricity grid to ensure more fossil fuels in this mix and less renewable.
Although all energy sources were cut off during the historic freeze, Republican legislators who control the legislature say that renewable energy has received full attention over the years, but has proved to be useless during the state crisis.
“It’s cool to enjoy the wind and solar energy these days, but the problem is that it makes us cold in the winter,” said state senator Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston who leads the Republican caucus in the Texas Senate.
Texas Electric Reliability Council officials said most of the generating plants that went offline this week were natural gas, coal or nuclear. Even so, Republicans chose wind and solar energy as targets, despite objections from Democrats and proponents of renewable energy.
Texas public service taxpayers have funded more than $ 7 billion over the past eight years, building transmission lines to bring wind power from western Texas to major cities. This made Texas the largest wind producer in the country.
Net generation per thousand megawatts hour throughout 2019.
1. Natural gas – 255,630
2. Coal – 91,817
3. Wind – 83,620
4. Nuclear – 41,298
5. Solar – 4,365
6. Other gases – 2,869
7. Conventional Hydroelectric – 1,475
8. Biomass – 14.61
(Source: US Energy Information Agency)
But Bettencourt and other Republicans say advantages such as federal subsidies for wind and solar energy need to be balanced.
“We need a basic charge power generation strategy in Texas that is reliable and not based on renewable energies so strongly,” he said.
Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, this week overhauled a bill he introduced at the last session that would require ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission to draft rules that “would eliminate or compensate for market distortion caused by certain federal tax credits.”
“It’s not just frozen wind turbines; it is the fact that they exist that is creating the problem, ”said Patterson, who works as an energy consultant. “Their existence, their highly subsidized existence in our network, is creating a shortage of energy supply because no one else can compete against them.
The previous version of the law was reduced to one that would require a study of market distortion. He died on the committee. But this year Patterson says he hopes there will be more interest, and he is now on the calendar committee that chooses which projects will reach the House floor.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott suggested a similar approach in an interview with FOX News earlier this week, when he made it clear that he believes clean energy sources are unreliable in the winter – although other states can maintain wind turbines in operation because the equipment is weather resistant to deal with the cold weather, unlike Texas.
“It just shows that fossil fuel is needed by the state of Texas, as well as other states, to ensure that we will be able to heat our homes in the winter and cool our homes in the summer,” said Abbott.
State Senator Kelly Hancock, a Republican from North Texas who heads the committee that will investigate power outages, spent part of the week celebrating the work that thermal energy sources have been doing to compensate for failures in renewable energy.
Hancock is chairman of the Senate Business and Commerce Committee, which will hold its hearing on February 25.
Blaming renewable energy is wrong and politically motivated, said Adrian Shelley, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a consumer protection group.
“There is no energy source that does not receive subsidies,” said Shelley. “There have been tax credits for energy for fossil fuel sources for a hundred years, so targeting renewable tax credit … is very false.”
Requiring ERCOT responses
Both the Senate and the Texas House have scheduled hearings from next week on what has caused so many Texans to be left in cold temperatures without power. Lawmakers already say they have many doubts about ERCOT, the non-governmental group that manages the state’s electricity grid.
Abbott asked for the resignation of ERCOT leadership.
State Senator Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, is among those who question why ERCOT has board members who do not live in Texas. The ERCOT president lives in Michigan and the vice president in Germany.
“I am concerned that they have not fully considered the impact of their decisions to cut the power of vulnerable Texans,” said Alvarado in a letter to the chairman of the Texas Public Utility Commission, which oversees ERCOT.
Abbott criticized ERCOT employees for poor communication throughout the crisis. He said they were not transparent and did not provide information to the public or elected officials, including himself.
State Senator Joan Huffman, R-Fort Bend, says she will schedule hearings to deepen the reaction of ERCOT and the Public Service Commission.
“I look forward to asking direct questions from the leaders of these entities in a public forum, because the people of Texas deserve answers and this committee will demand them,” said Huffman.
But while there may be reforms to ERCOT, few Republicans are talking about the prospect of ordering the state’s nearly 700 power plants to invest in air conditioning and how much it would cost.
ERCOT officials said earlier this week at a statewide news conference that, while it was recommended that the plants withstand the weather after the winter storms in 2011 interrupted power, these were voluntary and not mandatory orders.
Jon Rosenthal, a Houston Democrat and senior mechanical engineer in the oil and gas industry, said he is working on legislation that would increase the supply of backup power to Texas, for example, by linking the state to the nationally interconnected system or offering resources financial incentives for suppliers to increase reserve power.
Rosenthal would also like to see reliability standards introduced that require generators to condition their systems. He said he knew that adding more regulations would be an uphill battle in the majority Republican legislature, but he believes that there is a “middle ground” that can be reached.
“While the common argument ‘we don’t want regulation so that we can supply electricity as cheaply as possible’ provides cheap energy most of the time, these disasters are terribly expensive,” said Rosenthal. “I’ve heard people in the insurance industry say that this could be the most expensive natural disaster ever in Texas. Therefore, you make a small investment in your infrastructure to ensure that it will not have these disastrous consequences. “
He added: “And it’s not just the cost of that. It is human suffering. “
Bettencourt, who has been without power for much of the week, said he is focused on ensuring that enough energy comes from thermal sources in the winter to avoid a repeat of what Texas has just been through.
Although Texas is the largest national producer of oil and natural gas, it has also been praised for turning off coal-fired electricity sources and increasingly turning to cheaper renewable sources, such as wind and solar. Most of the state’s facilities are natural gas, coal and nuclear.
Dan Woodfin, senior director at ERCOT, said earlier this week that one of the most affected energy supplies was natural gas.
“It seems that a large part of the generation that went offline today was mainly due to problems in the natural gas system,” he said.