AUSTIN, Texas — With the anniversary of the statewide freeze and power grid failure fast approaching, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is facing renewed questions about the stability of the state’s grid and whether the necessary fixes were made during this year’s legislative session to ensure that Texans aren’t once again plunged into cold and darkness for days on end.
“I’m very confident about the grid,” Abbott said during a late November appearance on Fox 7 in Austin. “I can guarantee the lights will stay on.”
But his opponents in next year’s gubernatorial contest think otherwise.
Democrat Beto O’Rourke has made the power grid a centerpiece of his campaign, visiting families affected by the outages and hammering Abbott during rallies, claiming that the governor has lost the trust of voters and saying Texans should not take him at his word when he says necessary reforms were passed to fix the grid.
Abbott also is being criticized by Republican challengers Don Huffines, a former state senator from Dallas, and Allen West, a former Texas GOP chairman. Both Huffines and West say Abbott failed to prevent a future disaster and is too cozy with industry leaders to enact real change.
But political experts say there’s a limited window of opportunity to score political points by focusing on the state’s response to the grid failure. A lot depends on what happens during the coming winter months and whether the lights stay on.
“People have a short memory,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “Barring any major disaster, most voters won’t vote on the grid issue alone. … The grid is important, but voters either saw the freeze as a fluke or believe the governor when he says the problem is solved.”
Texas lawmakers pledged to fix electric grid
In February, deadly winter storms swept the state, and the severe conditions prompted a series of failures in the state’s energy sector that led to a nearly catastrophic failure of the electric grid. The resulting widespread blackouts contributed to hundreds of deaths across the state and billions of dollars in property damage.
At the time, lawmakers pledged to take quick and thorough action and held hourslong hearings at which they grilled officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, overseer of the grid; the Public Utility Commission; and local power companies.
Many observers feared that history would repeat itself and that — as in 2011 when lawmakers didn’t take action to address failures in the state’s energy delivery system in the wake of a devastating winter storm — state leaders would not heed the warnings of experts and make the necessary changes to prevent failures.
O’Rourke contends that this is in fact the case, telling the Austin American-Statesman that Abbott should have directed state lawmakers to set clearer and more enforceable standards for weatherizing the natural gas supply.
“There’s a lot of blame cast by the governor on others, but in Texas we know that the buck stops at the governor’s desk,” he said. “The governor cannot only propose legislation, but he literally sets the agenda in the special sessions. There have been three special sessions, and none of them have had this on the agenda. It’s totally within the governor’s purview and his responsibility. The accountability starts with him and stops with him.”
Among numerous changes, lawmakers mandated that power generators on the grid be required to winterize their facilities, the first time such an edict has been approved. New reporting requirements were implemented to improve communication across energy sectors to prepare in the event of an emergency that may require generators to cut off electricity to some users.
Plus, lawmakers made sweeping changes to leadership at ERCOT and the utility commission.
“The most important difference now than before the winter storm occurred is the approach ERCOT is taking where they are being proactive instead of reactive,” Abbott said in a December appearance on the Mark Davis radio show in North Texas. “The decision-making process was bizarre in that they would wait until there was a crisis to take the action that was needed to respond to that crisis. That’s the absolute wrong way to approach a crisis like this.”
But energy experts and regulators say his guarantee that the grid will function this year is risky and could discourage people from taking necessary steps to prepare for an outage. And depending on what happens, the political implications could be significant.
Voters have already expressed displeasure with the response to the storms, with 60% saying they disapproved of how state leaders addressed the reliability of the grid in an October University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll.
“While the voters are not necessarily following politics really closely all of the time, they are aware when things like the power grid failure directly affect them — their lights turned off,” said Jennifer Clark, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “Some received electricity bills that were well over $1,000 worth of charges, and we even had some Texans die. They’re going to want answers and to know what the plan is. They’ll want to see their leader looking out for them and not the oil and gas companies.”
Abbott drew further criticism from his political opponents in late December, after holding a closed-door meeting with energy producers at his Capitol office. In a news release, Abbott said he met with the producers to discuss grid reliability and winter preparedness.
The meeting was not open to the public or members of the media. The governor’s office offered a brief summary of the discussion in a press release, which said energy leaders spoke with Abbott about investments they’ve made over the past year to improve reliability and prepare for an energy emergency.
“The State of Texas has taken unprecedented steps to protect our critical power infrastructure and increase power generation to ensure that our electric grid is reliable and capable of meeting demand,” he said in a statement. “We will continue to work collaboratively with energy providers across the state to further improve the dependability of the grid and ensure that Texans do not face power outages like those experienced last winter.”
O’Rourke and West both seized on the meetings, criticizing Abbott for taking political contributions from the same companies that stood to profit from the power outages.
“Never forget that there was an 11-year-old little boy in Conroe, Texas, that his parents tried to put blanket upon blanket upon blanket on him, but he lost his life,” West said in an interview with the Houston Chronicle. “That should never happen again.”
In a video shared on Twitter, O’Rourke said Abbott is “more interested in looking out for his campaign contributors than he is in protecting all of us in the state of Texas.”
Grid failure prompts candidate proposals
Huffines and West have both put forward proposals to improve the reliability of the state’s electric grid, focusing on different components of the energy supply chain.
On his website, Huffines says Texas “needs a governor who can keep the lights on” and that the solution is lessening the state’s reliance on “provenly unreliable green energy sources.”
In the immediate aftermath of the February outages, Abbott and other Republicans in the state inaccurately placed the blame on wind and solar energy producers. In reality, the failure of natural gas plants was the biggest cause of the power shortfall.
Huffines proposes halting state subsidies for renewable energy generators and requiring those generators to pay for acquiring ancillary services, which help ensure enough power is generated for the state’s main grid. Huffines also is pitching the creation of a grid security commission featuring representatives from different regulatory agencies.
West offers a similar path forward and has pledged to create a security commission to defend the grid, while also implementing “a system of third-party, preventative maintenance checks and services for our existing energy power plants.”
West also is targeting renewable energy sources in his plan, pleading to diversify the state’s energy portfolio so the state does not rely on renewable energy sources.
“Texas will never again leave her citizens in the dark, especially since we live in an energy abundant state,” West says in his plan.
O’Rourke has not published a plan on his website, but he told the Statesman he has five proposals for improving grid reliability in the short and long term.
The first is weatherizing the natural gas supply and setting clear and enforceable standards for the industry. O’Rourke also said Texas should connect to the national electric grid, which he says would let the state tap into additional power as needed to prevent an outage and create economic opportunity by allowing Texas to sell excess power to other states.
Texas is the only state that operates its own power grid, but portions of the state are connected to the national grids, including in El Paso, the upper Panhandle and a piece of East Texas.
O’Rourke also said he would work to ensure that critical facilities such as hospitals, nursing homes, airports and other locations have backup generation available in case of emergencies. He’d also look to enact “immediate and consistent” assistance for people facing rate increases after a winter storm.
A light bulb is coated with ice in downtown Round Rock last February. The city began an extended period of winter weather Feb. 11 with freezing rain that downed limbs and caused power outages.
Looking more to the future, O’Rourke’s proposals include investing in energy efficiency programs to help ease demand on the grid and reduce individual electricity bills.
“I would focus on low-income Texans who need ratepayer assistance and make sure they have the resources to weatherize their homes and require less power, so their utility bills will drop significantly,” O’Rourke said. “It provides some small measure of justice to the people who were hardest hit during that winter storm when the grid failed. It’s the least expensive part of the solution.”
