The lights went out in Texas – and went out, and went out, causing frozen water pipes, ruined houses, lost livelihoods and even deaths – because of the extreme cold that the state’s electricity grid was not prepared to deal with and for because of political decisions that led to this lack of preparation and prevented utilities to respond quickly.
There are significant lessons here for South Carolina, both in preparation and in politics.
Therefore, it is encouraging that the state Regulatory Control Office – recognizing that polar vortexes have become more common and that temperature spikes are increasing in both directions – has launched a review to determine how SC services are prepared for emergency emergencies. cold weather, supported by Governor Henry McMaster.
On Monday, the agency asked energy companies to provide very specific information about potential threats, costs and measures they took “to mitigate the negative impacts of potential ice storms and other dangerous weather conditions and to ensure that peak demands of customers in the utility system can be found during extreme weather scenarios. ”
That information will be essential in determining whether authorities should require energy companies to do what Texas officials refused to do, despite warnings after a massive snowstorm a decade ago that caused blackouts that left millions of people without power : spend more money to prepare power plants and supply lines to withstand temperatures outside of what used to be the norm.
This should also help to illustrate the need, as Eddy Moore of the Coastal Conservation League explained in a guest column on Wednesday, for utilities to take the cheapest and easiest step to avoid blackouts, helping customers save electricity through more efficient air conditioning projects and heating systems and appliances.
Global changes in our climate mean that it’s likely to be just a matter of time before South Carolina also has deadly cold waves – along with warmer heat waves and deeper floods – and our power grid needs to be up to the task. assignment. There is a real cost to making a power grid more resilient, but there is also a cost for not doing so when necessary.
Any power system would have trouble maintaining itself when temperatures fell far below normal lows, as in Texas, and would remain below them for so long.
But the cascading emergencies were triggered by the addition of Texas’s extreme experiment in deregulation of the energy market and its decision two decades ago – driven by reluctance to submit to the necessary federal regulation – to boycott the two regional power grids that the other 47 contiguous states all belong to. That meant that when Texas ran out of power, there was nowhere to turn.
This, in turn, was a consequence of Texas legislators’ strong sense of independence, their tendency to bow to local special interests and their faith in the infallibility of the free market and the certainty that the government, and particularly government regulation, it is the root of all evil.
Sound familiar?
After the VC Summer disaster helped all of us to recognize how much our state failed to put “regulated” into regulated monopolies – and to better understand how these monopolies operate – South Carolina is properly exploiting electricity deregulation.
Texas’ big lesson is not that deregulation is inherently bad. Is that Texas-style deregulation, without barriers, is inherently bad. Or at least dangerous. (And, according to a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal, also expensive: 60% of customers who are forced to buy electricity from retail electricity suppliers – both for consumer choice – pay 21% more than customers who can buy from traditional utilities.)
The lesson for us is that there are different ways to deregulate and different degrees of deregulation – that there is a big difference between the deregulation of Texas and the deregulation of California and the deregulation of Maryland and all the other deregulated markets between the two.
Texans may not admit that the Valentine’s Day storm demonstrated that their extreme version of deregulation is broken; that’s their problem. What is important for South Carolina is to add its experience to the growing body of evidence on what works and what doesn’t.
What is important is that we understand that everything we do needs to be pragmatic rather than philosophical, led by independent experts, consumers and interests beyond energy interests. Yes, utility companies and other energy interests need to be at the table, but we don’t need to let them carry the table over to their own private buffet, as Texas lawmakers did.