The Final Countdown

By this time next week, the 88th Texas Regular Legislative Session will be over. 

Make no mistake: none of the grid bills under consideration today and throughout the week do much to improve grid reliability. The most impactful bills — including proposals to increase energy efficiency and create opportunities for consumers to get paid to reduce demand at times of scarcity — are all but dead. 

The bills that are likely to pass are primarily about redesigning the ERCOT market to pay incumbent generators more money (SB 7 and SB 2012) or giving subsidies to new gas plants (SB 2627 and SJR 93). The February 2021 blackouts, which supposedly prompted this legislation, were due to lack of winterization of gas supply, power plants, and homes and buildings. ERCOT had plenty of capacity, but half of it didn’t work in the extreme cold, ice, and snow. 

So these bills do not address the root causes of those outages. Instead, the biggest debates today will likely be over whether to raise consumer costs by only a few billion dollars, or by tens of billions of dollars…