To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
February 22, 2021
Re: A storm brings trouble, but deregulation brings disaster
by Frank Arango, Seattle Workers' Voice
The latest news is that around 70 people died in the February 13-17 winter storm. The largest number were in Texas, where the root cause of many deaths was utility companies doing things on the cheap in order to increase their rate of profit, and the misnamed Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) letting them get away with it. Indeed, one could accurately say that the utility companies and ERCOT killed people with their policies, such as those who froze to death because they had no heat. What happened?
Texas produces more electricity than any other state. But during the
storm the demand for electricity radically increased because of record
low temperatures. Then, on the night of February 14, power plants began
to fail, and ERCOT could not get electricity from neighboring states.
The interconnection (1) operators therefore had to institute rolling
blackouts in order to save equipment and substations from exploding or
burning, and, thereby, to prevent loss of the entire system. If the
latter had happened, it could have taken weeks or months to get the
grid operating again.
1: Since the 1930s (and whether it was run by Republicans or Democrats), Texas has maintained an independent electrical interconnection covering most of the state in order to escape federal regulation. If it sends or receives electricity to or from another state that would be considered interstate commerce, making it subject to regulation. Thus, the Texas interconnection has not been engineered to receive energy during emergencies like the one we just had.
2: Texas has had crises in supplying power that demanded rolling
blackouts before, with the last one being caused by an ice storm in
February 2011. What's more, after the 2011 blackouts the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission "suggested" (it had no power to "require" in
Texas) that Southwest "legislatures require power companies to submit
winterization plans and give their public-utility commissions the
authority to require senior executives of power companies to sign off
on those plans and the authority 'to impose penalties for
non-compliance.'" The result in Texas was that the head of ERCOT met
with power companies to "suggest" that they better winterize. (It's
said that at least 11 of the 15 ERCOT board members have current or
prior ties to the energy industry.) (2)
So ten years later winterization was still not being done, and lack of winterization was the main cause of this year's crisis. Of course fossil-fuel-loving Governor Abbott initially tried to point to frozen wind turbines as being the cause, and it's true that about half of them went off line. But that's because they weren't winterized with anti-freeze and heating elements within the turbine blades, the normal practice in colder states. Moreover, Texas gets most of its electricity from natural gas and coal fired plants (and some from nuclear generation), anyway, and many of those plants also went down because they hadn't been winterized. For example, all need water, but critical pipes froze because they had not been insulated.
3: No backup energy supply. According to the Texas Monthly, "many
states’ power-market rules allow electricity generators to be paid to
hold power in reserve in case it’s needed. Under the deregulation
scheme passed by the Legislature more than two decades ago, Texas has a
market design that allows generators to make money only by selling
juice —- not for investing in equipment that could help produce extra
power in the event of an emergency." (3) Indeed, Texas went from having
the most robust reserve margin in the country (25%) - the measure of
how much surplus power the grid can count on in extreme conditions - to
the lowest in the country by the Summer of 2019 at 7.5%." (4)
Lawsuits are already being filed, as they should be. (5) But there
should also be mass pressure for criminal charges to be brought. (In
this regard, California's Pacific Gas and Electric, PG&E, recently
pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for causing the
2018 wildfire that killed these people, a victory. But then the court
let PG&E off with paying only $3.5 million in fines plus an
agreement to pay $15 million to Butte County residents who lost water
access.)
For sure, the Federal energy regulations are weak, and they need to be strengthened by mass pressure. But they're better than what Texas has had. Moreover, Texas needs to be able to get power from other states in emergencies, as well as be able to send power to them when they have emergencies. The working people should not be forced to pay!
As in other disasters, it was the poor who suffered most during this
month's winter storm. But once again proving that capitalism is
heartless, the very Texas utility companies responsible for the lights
going out because they wouldn't winterize are now outrageously jacking
up electric bills for those on variable rate contracts exposed to the
full vagaries of marketplace pricing. (6) Many Texans are burning with
anger over this, and we non-Texans should support any resistance
actions they organize.
(1) An interconnection is a wide-area synchronous system of grids. With the exception of Texas, the rest of the continental United States is covered by the Western and Eastern interconnections, which also cover most of Canada.
(2) Jeffrey Ball, "The Texas Blackout Is the Story of a Disaster Foretold: Those in charge of Texas's deregulated power sector were warned again and again that the electric grid was vulnerable", Feb. 19, 2021, Texas Monthly.
(3) Ibid.
(4) "Energy Fairness: Deregulation to blame for Texas energy meltdown", PR Newswire, February 18, 2021.
(5) Bill Hutchinson, "Family of 11-year-old boy who died in Texas deep freeze files $100 million suit against power companies: Cristian Pineda's mother found him dead in their freezing mobile home", February 21, 2021, ABC News.
(6) Shannon Najmabadi, "Texas blindsided by massive electric bills
await details of Gov. Greg Abbott's promised relief: Electric bills are
likely to rise for everyone, experts and consumer advocates say, but
some Texans on variable rate contracts have been hit with immediate,
massive price spikes. Lawmakers and the governor have promised to help,
but haven't said how", Feb. 22, 2021, The Texas Tribune,
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/22/texas-pauses-electric-bills/. <>
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