Texas Does It Bigger, Especially Hubris

“California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity. 

Harris/AOC want to make CA’s failed energy policy the standard nationwide. Hope you don’t like air conditioning!”

August 19th Tweet from Texas Senator Ted Cruz as wildfires took out the power grid to some California communities.

It’s called a polar vortex. Warmer arctic air expands and pushes much colder air southward into the normal west-to-east currents. In mid-February, that frigid air enveloped the entirety of Texas, dropping temperatures down to single and lower double digits… plus masses of snow and ice that took out powerlines everywhere. “As many as 4 million residents, or about 15% of the state, spent much of the last weekend [Valentine’s/President’s weekend] without electricity because the state’s power grid buckled under an onslaught of ice, snow and subfreezing temperatures. The agency overseeing the state’s power grid said Tuesday [2/16] that it can’t predict when electrical service will be restored to all residents.” Michael Hiltzik writing for the February 17th Los Angeles Times. This level of cold broke a few records, but Texas has faced this kind of polar vortex before, usually not more frequently that once a decade. Just not worth preparing for.

The it got worse. Virtually all of the fossil fuel generating plants, mostly natural gas, experienced severe compromising damage. And while the wind turbines worked better than expected, the state skimped and bought the unwinterized versions, which eventually froze too, outlasting traditional generators. And while every relevant commission and supervising board, the governor and the legislature and the governor were dominated by Republicans, they still had to take a dig and, without any evidence to support their claim, state that a Green New Deal would have been so much worse. That was about the time their aging power grid began to fail dramatically. And then there was the water shortage, with an order for many to boil what they consumed. How?

If it were anywhere but Texas, the system would automatically have been supported by electricity from out-of-state suppliers through a federally regulated power grid. But the Republic of Texas, railing at “liberals in Washington” or just “Washington politicians,” likes to reference the “s” word every now and again: secession from the United States. Some call it Texit. With Biden as president, that “s” word was increasingly common. “At the end of January, a state legislator filed a bill aimed at creating a legislative committee by referendum ‘to develop a plan for achieving Texas independence.’

“The measure quickly won the endorsement of state GOP Chairman Allen West, who said the measure aimed to give Texans ‘a right to voice their opinions on a critical issue.’… You may not hear much of this rhetoric at the moment. That’s because Texas’ need for assistance from outside its borders has reached a high level of urgency.” LA Times. Shouldn’t Texas immediately ask for and receive federal disaster relief? Almost any other state would be entitled to such federal support. But here’s where Texas hubris kicks in. Back in 1935, the state went out of its way to pull its entire electrical power generation and supporting power grid into a system that is totally self-contained and intentionally isolated from interstate commerce… so that it could entirely escape federal regulation. Yee ha!

And yet, “On Saturday [2/13], Gov. Greg Abbott appealed to President Biden for an emergency federal disaster declaration. Biden promptly delivered, freeing federal assistance to flow into the state by the billions of dollars (and without first insisting on an expression of personal fealty to the White House, unlike a former president [we] could name).” LA Times. Where is Mr Cruz? Smug and anti-federal from top to bottom, sneering at dumb states unprepared for natural disasters? Complaining that federal tax dollars should not be wasted on state disasters for which the relevant state was woefully unprepared? Photos of Mr Cruz, not yet confirmed, suggest he might have flown to much warmer Cancun, Mexico during the freeze.

The Cruz/Abbott Texas Republican machine, bolstered by some serious gerrymandering and voter suppression, is hellbent on opposing Democratic healthcare legislation and Biden’s 100 days suspension of harsh immigration detention. Texas Attorney General Warren “Ken” Paxton, Jr. has initiated, joined and/or pledged to continue to use the courts to hobble Democratic legislation and executive actions any way he can. Even with federal aid approved by Mr. Biden, don’t count on this litigation process to stop.

Call the 1935 effort a new way to approach “separation of power,” the “eventual result was the creation of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which manages the state grid. Federal regulators were always concerned that ERCOT’s self-reliance would leave it unable to ‘respond to events such as generating plant or transmission line outages,’ which turns out to be true.

“But even though some Texas electricity occasionally leaked over the border to Oklahoma and Louisiana, and ERCOT itself very occasionally bought emergency power from Mexican utilities, these incidents weren’t enough for the feds to declare the Texas grid an interstate entity.

“The next element in the downfall of the Texas power grid was deregulation. Despite the example of California’s misadventure with electrical deregulation, which created the state energy crisis in 2000-01, Texas deregulated its energy market in 2002… Henceforth, residents could contract for power with any retail provider opting into the deregulated market. The deregulation measure also rolled back electric prices by 6% from the pre-deregulation period. Retail providers wanting to grow market share would have to beat the new price standard.

“This system produced two apparently contradictory results. Prices from deregulated utilities tended to exceed those from providers exempt from deregulation, such as municipally owned utilities and electric cooperatives… According to the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, which comprises dozens of municipalities, Texas residential consumers paid $22 billion more for electricity between 2002 and 2014 than they would have if they had remained customers of regulated utilities… Indeed, by 2014, Texans in the deregulated zone paid more for electricity than the national average, and an average of 15% more than customers served by municipal utilities.

“Yet the utility industry as a whole has found it hard to raise enough money to perform needed maintenance on its infrastructure… ‘The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,’ Ed Hirs of the University of Houston told the Houston Chronicle. ‘It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.’… The system was also beset by some of the same problems experienced by California, such as fraud and gaming of the market by sophisticated participants. (One firm at the center of these problems in both California and Texas: Houston-based Enron.).” LA Times. Right across the border, Arkansas lights shone bright. But then, Texas’ power grid is not connected to any other state.

Texas is all about smaller government, lower taxes, and unregulated business. Screw quality of life, healthcare and basic services. Texans are used to going it alone. Anything less would be “socialism,” a favorite catchphrase to describe anything the local GOP does not like. Tell that to the folks who are watching their pipes burst as the lack if even minimal power leaves millions defenseless against the big freeze.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the notion of reaffirming “national unity,” an admirable Biden administration goal, is tough to achieve where tons of Americans believe in “themselves first.”