This month, ERCOT released a staggering projection: the agency says 62 gigawatts of new demand could plug into Texas’ grid by 2030. 

It looks like a decimal point got lost somewhere. The state’s all-time demand record is 85.5 gigawatts, and it took a century to get there. ERCOT says that could jump 72% in a little more than five years.

Texas simply isn’t going to build that much gas generation — there’s no way to build even a fraction of that and even if we could, consumers couldn’t possibly afford it. But there is a way to serve all of that demand and increase reliability at the same time…

Late Sunday — after the Texas Legislature, at the 11th hour, passed monumental electricity grid bills that stitched together a range of energy proposals that many had assumed to be dead — a friend asked on Twitter, “Does this mean the grid is fixed?” 

No. Not even close.

Over the past 20 weeks, state leaders have, with frightening consistency, focused on the wrong energy-related issues. They wasted time and energy attacking Texas’ nation-leading clean energy sector — something most states and countries pine for — while ignoring consumer-centric solutions that would reduce bills and increase reliability.

The only good news as the 88th legislative session came to a close was the surprising lack of bad news. 

Bad bills that died (or got better)

A remarkable coalition of environmentalists, industry organizations and business groups — including more than 50 chambers of commerce, manufacturers, generators, oil & gas advocates, and others — stopped very real efforts to shut down the renewable energy industry in Texas. 

As attack after attack rolled out of the Texas Senate, the state House of Representatives consistently raised red flags about the effects of such legislation on consumers. House State Affairs Committee Chairman Todd Hunter — a pro-business, anti-nonsense Republican from Corpus Christi — often led the questioning on behalf of consumers. And most anti-renewable bills could not stand up to that scrutiny…

When the Texas House State Affairs Committee heard market reform bills for the first time last week, Chairman Todd Hunter implored witnesses to focus on the Texans who too often have been lost in the conversations about Texas’ energy future: “Now the one name I never hear is the word consumer or public or the taxpayer or the ratepayer. … Look at the impact on the public, the consumer, the ratepayer and the taxpayer.”

Good.

Because Texas consumers and ratepayers will certainly be missing from this week’s energy conversation on the other side of the Capitol. The Senate is poised to approve bills this week that could send electricity costs skyrocketing — no one knows by how much. And Senators, it seems, couldn’t care less…

Two years have passed since Winter Storm Uri plunged Texas into darkness — yet policymakers are still far from ensuring a reliable grid. There are a multitude of reasons for this. For instance, Texas hasn’t done nearly enough to winterize power plants, gas supply, or homes and buildings.

But the biggest problem may simply be one of vision: policymakers aren’t seeing — or, at least, aren’t acknowledging — that there are a multitude of grid challenges facing them, and, by necessity, they will require varied solutions. No single answer will solve them.

The ERCOT energy only market is—to borrow Churchill’s comment about democracy—the worst form of an energy market, except for all the others. Texans expect their leaders to make changes to protect them and their property from future extreme weather events. Unfortunately, too many state leaders have fallen under the spell of capacity market solutions — most peddled by large power generation companies — that would waste billions of consumers’ dollars for little or no reliability benefit.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) has already endorsed a version of a capacity market, albeit a wholly untried and unproven one with an eye-glazing name: Performance Credit Mechanism, or PCM. It sounds meritocratic, but it isn’t: the PCM’s distinguishing characteristic is that it would pay generators if they are available at certain times, not necessarily if they actually perform when needed.