The Homestead: Keeping Texas Texan
There’s no getting around it: this is a bad week for Texas. For too many Texans, it is downright catastrophic.
What should have been, at worst, a few days of snow and ice leading to some missed school and snarled commutes, turned into a week — at least — of rolling blackouts, water cutoffs, shortages of essentials, and sometimes worse. As I write this, the end is in sight only for the weather: in three days, the forecast says, our local temperatures will finally stay above freezing for twenty-four hours. But when will our electricity return? When will our city’s boil-water notice be lifted? No one can seem to say.
The entire country is pummeled by the cold. Only Texas is experiencing it as a full-on disaster.
Why? We’ll know the full story in the days, weeks, and months to come. The Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, the Speaker of the Texas House, and nearly every elected officeholder in the state are demanding answers. They’re right to, and they’ll get them. In the meantime, we already know the outlines of the calamity. It’s a story of the last decade of electricity generation policy in the Lone Star State — all culminating in one disastrous night, just a few days back, when the cold rolled in.
Look back one decade, and you see a Texas power grid, presided over by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), with plenty of excess capacity. Unlike California’s chronically mismanaged grid, Texas was able to handle exceptional weather — usually hot, not cold — and extraordinary growth. Texas did so well, in fact, that an assumption crept into the decision making at ERCOT and elsewhere: that Texas would always do well. We’re an energy state, after all. We’ve never had a California-type energy crisis, after all.
And so the decisions, at the federal level, the state level, and elsewhere, accumulated. Two decisions in particular had a devastating effect this week.
One decision was to allow the excess capacity of the grid — the available buffer — to slip, year upon year, almost unnoticed.
One decision was to allow taxpayer-subsidized renewable-energy sources to crowd out traditional generation.
These two decisions, which eroded our state grid’s margin of safety, intersected with catastrophic ERCOT management on the night of the big freeze — and the rest is history. Nearly the whole nation is plunged into the freeze. Only Texas is plunged into the dark.
It’s time to re-think and re-formulate our state’s energy policies — especially as they relate to electricity generation. First comes accountability. Hard after it, though, comes reform. At the Texas Public Policy Foundation, our Life:Powered project has for years been seeking reforms that — had they been in place — would have prevented this disaster. We’ve always been against distorting the Texas power grid with taxpayer-subsidized sources that can’t deliver reliable power in a crisis. We’ve always been against the resultant diminishment of reserve capacity that placed our state in peril.
In fact, one of our Liberty Action Agenda items for the current Texas Legislative session is the development of a market-based system that will require all electricity generators in the state to guarantee a certain amount of dispatchable — readily available — power available to the grid.
Texas families who are spending this week in the dark, without water, deserve better. Texas communities deserve better. Texas enterprises deserve better. Everyone who banked their hopes and dreams on good governance and good administration in the Lone Star State deserves better.
We have to trust they’ll get it. They have to: because ultimately, this is about much more than our electrical grid. It’s about more than withstanding bad weather. This crisis is about whether Texas works. It’s about whether Texas is a fit repository and trust for the big dreams of the best people in the world.
At the Foundation, we believe in Texas. We know you do too. And we know that’s why we have to get to work.
This week in Texas history: On February 15th, 1876, citizens of Texas adopted the Constitution of 1876.
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