Washington’s power to respond to the Texas electrical disaster is limited

But political and legal questions hover over Washington’s response. Federal emergency funds cannot legally be used for utility bills that have skyrocketed for some people, local governments and companies in Texas’s open market system. And lobbyists and congressional advisers hope Texas will continue to defend a system it has worked for years to protect from federal jurisdiction.

An extraordinarily powerful cold wave for the state paralyzed the Texas power grid this month. It left more than four million Texans without electricity and heat, many for days in sub-zero temperatures, and resulted in 80 deaths.

President Biden will meet in Houston on Friday with state and local officials, according to the White House. A disaster declaration he signed on Saturday now applies to more than 100 counties, opening grants and low-cost loans to residents and business owners. The Low Income Domestic Energy Assistance Program can also help some subjects with large utility bills.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott promised in a statewide speech on Wednesday to find answers to what went wrong. He said he would ensure that state lawmakers approve corrections.

In addition to immediate needs, Congressional committees and federal regulators are beginning to investigate how the Texas grid failed and what this suggests about future threats to reliability across the country. They are also analyzing commodity trade during the event, to examine whether market manipulation played a role in raising prices.

Texas has few, and often none, requirements for buildings and power plants to be weather resistant, instead relying on established free market prices to provide incentives for companies to do so on their own. In a state more accustomed to hot summers, these companies largely ignored previous federal warnings to prepare for the chills of the Arctic winter.

Almost 185 generating units, mostly gas and coal-fired capacity, have shut down. The resulting scarcity and unexpectedly high demand have led to rising electricity prices. Wholesale energy prices have risen more than 400-fold from last year’s average.

The Senate Energy Committee is preparing a hearing on the reliability of the network. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees interstate pipelines and wholesale electricity markets, launched three hearings, examining what happened during the cold snap, the threat of climate change to grid reliability and the potential manipulation of the market during the disaster.

FERC’s authority is limited because the network serving most of Texas has limited links that cross state lines. The agency has the power to define new reliability requirements.

The White House and its allies in Congress are also pushing for infrastructure spending that they said could deal with climate change and some of the risks exposed by the Texas crisis, a boost reinforced by the event, analysts said.

“It is clear that these types of weather events are going to happen more often,” said Gina McCarthy, head of the White House’s Office of Domestic Climate Policy in an interview. “We need to make changes and rethink, from the bottom up, how we supply energy and keep it reliable.”

Lawmakers are not expected to adopt emergency legislation focusing on the Texas disaster. Although Congress has approved independent aid for some major disasters, it often links additional emergency funds to other pieces of legislation.

As part of the $ 1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan, Democrats are trying to provide FEMA with $ 50 billion in disaster relief funds.

In addition to spending on infrastructure, new federal policies and regulations to improve the electricity grid across the country are seen as more difficult because it is highly balkanized, with states and regions defending its control.

In general, Washington cannot tell Texas how to manage its electricity market because state officials have worked for decades to build an energy market that works largely free from federal regulations.

The Texas Public Utility Commission, at an emergency meeting last weekend, took steps to prevent consumers from being cut for failure to pay. Governor Abbott sought out the legislature in search of solutions and new rules to prevent price hikes in the future.

After another power outage during a cold snap in 2011, FERC made several recommendations for Texas to protect its system against winter. State officials suggested best practices, but they never made them requirements and did not set penalties for plants that did not follow the guidelines.

“For me, the biggest problem is why no investment was made in HVAC for a decade, when there was a clarion in 2011 that this needed to happen. What was the collapse? ”, Deputy Ro Khanna (D., California) said in an interview.

Khanna is initiating an investigation through a Chamber oversight subcommittee on the environment he chairs. The Chamber’s Energy and Commerce Committee should also investigate. Senator John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), The top Republican on the Senate energy panel, is supporting similar efforts in the Senate.

FERC, the federal electricity regulator, is planning new winter weather requirements and looking for potential vulnerabilities. It has the authority to impose fines or trade restrictions on individuals and companies if it considers that they have violated the electricity market rules on market manipulation.

North American Electric Reliability Corp., a non-profit organization overseen by FERC, has developed new reliability requirements for extreme weather conditions.

The group, known as NERC, issued guidelines after the 2011 Texas failure. But repeated failures and extreme weather conditions convinced NERC officials that the guidelines were ineffective and should be enforced with enforceable mandates, said NERC spokeswoman Kimberly Mielcarek.

The NERC could require power generators to insulate pumps and instruments from the cold and to protect water supplies from freezing or other weather protection efforts – measures that are now only suggestions from the federal government.

—Andrew Duehren contributed to this article.

Write to Timothy Puko at [email protected]