After the winter storm that left millions without electricity in Texas, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, also known as ERCOT, has come before several Texas House and Senate committees as per Gov. Greg Abbott’s request.
On Feb. 16, Abbott declared ERCOT an emergency item for the 87th Texas Legislative Session.
Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa (D-McAllen) will be part of a legislative hearing as vice chairman of the Senate Jurisprudence Committee Thursday to find out what went wrong with Texas’ electric grid.
Hinojosa explains the reason for any legislative hearing in any type of situation is to ask questions to find out what happened.
“Who is responsible?,” he said. “How did this happen? What can we do to make changes that will prevent this type of situation happening again and proposed legislation to make the proper changes?”
The state senator also said the committee wants to look at the Public Utility Committee of Texas as it oversees ERCOT.
“They seem to have dropped the ball,” Hinojosa said. “Let’s point out a key issue, quite frankly ERCOT was very negligent in the way they handled the whole situation. They had a board meeting and in that board meeting, they spent 40 seconds discussing the winter storm that was around the corner and failed to take any action to try to protect the power generators and inform the public in terms of what actions to do to protect themselves.”
However, Political Science professor and department chair Clyde Barrow said the purpose of the public hearings is to gauge people’s views of what the impact of proposed legislation will be.
“None of this fundamentally structurally reforms a system of deregulated provision of public utilities and that’s the problem,” Barrow said. “You can tinker with it all you want, but you’re not going to solve the problem with tinkering.”
He does not believe reforming ERCOT is the solution.
“Getting rid of ERCOT and having the state regulate the energy or even better yet, the federal government bring it into compliance with national standards would be a better option,” Barrow said. “But given our current state leadership, I just don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Lucy Hernandez is the communications and administrative services director for the Brownsville Public Utilities Board. She tells Vaquero Radio that about 24,000 out of 52,000 customers were without power at the outages’ peak.
Barrow said there will be public hearings to create the impression that something will be done but, ultimately, nothing will change.
“Some emergency legislation will be passed that will not in any fundamentally way change anything, but it will create the illusion that something has changed,” he said. “And it will allow legislators and the governors to go back to their constituents and go, ‘You see, we, we fixed the problem,’ knowing that none of them are going to be around probably when this problem hits again.”
To view the hearing on Thursday, visit the Texas Senate’s website.
