Texas Gov. Greg Abbott hedged his bets yesterday during a press conference about the integrity of the Texas grid as another winter storm approaches the Lone Star State.
While reassuring Texans about the overall grid integrity, Abbott, who has been telling everyone within earshot that “I guarantee” the grid would not fail in any weather event this winter for 3 months, said yesterday that neither he nor anyone else could guarantee that no Texans would suffer power outages during this storm.
“Either ice on power lines … could cause a power line to go down, or it could be ice on trees that causes a tree to fall on power lines,” Abbott said, as reported by the Texas Tribune.
He’s right, of course, but he has not been tossing out this qualifier every time he’s made his absolute “guarantee” about the grid’s overall integrity. ERCOT officials, meanwhile, issued a winter weather advisory, in the process pointing to their estimate that they will have 15,000 megawatts of excess generating capacity available during this storm. While that’s likely an accurate number thanks to roughly 13,000 MW added to the grid during 2021, everyone must understand that virtually all of that new capacity is in the form of wind and solar power.
Researchers at Rice University’s Baker Institute demonstrated last fall that wind and solar were the first generation sources to drop off the grid as Winter Storm Uri arrived in Texas last February. Given that the PUC has implemented no requirements for winterization of wind or solar facilities, they will likely be the first to drop off the grid as the ice sets in from this storm.
The grid will most likely survive this storm – which pales in comparison to Uri – just fine, meaning Abbott will probably survive in his bid for re-election, too. But no one should think this means the Texas grid has been fixed, because that is certainly not the case.
In Europe, meanwhile, the European Commission (EC), an executive arm of the European Union (EU), advanced its plan to declare many power plants fired by natural gas or nuclear power as qualified “green” projects for the purposes of qualified sustainable investing. Wednesday, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, the EC published its revised proposal, containing some revisions to qualification requirements.
The advancement of the plan comes over the objections from several EU member countries, including Austria and Luxemborg, both of which have threatened to sue the EC if the plan were to ultimately be adopted. But other EU members have chosen to move in support of the proposal, which is part of the EU’s “green taxonomy,” that details requirements for sustainable investment criteria, as the European continent faces a potential energy crisis this winter.
“People need a benchmark, to say ‘I can hang my hat on something,’ and I think that’s where the taxonomy comes in,” said Shashank Krishna, a partner at law firm Baker Botts who specializes in sustainable energy investments. “Depending on how this whole debate on gas and nuclear plays out, this might actually become, by default, the global benchmark.”
That would be a positive development, both for Europe and the rest of the world, given the increasingly apparent reality that, despite the green dreams expressed in the “energy transition” narrative, the world will need more of all forms of energy in the future. Efforts by governments and ESG investors to impede investment in oil and natural gas in recent years are in part responsible for high current oil prices and astonishingly high prices for natural gas in Europe today. Any official move to remove such restrictions will serve as a mitigating factor on further cost increases in the future.
Specific to this proposal, the International Investors Group on Climate Change, which controls trillions of investment dollars, has called for the removal of natural gas from the EU’s plan. EU member countries will now have up to 6 months for review and consideration before they must vote to approve or reject it.
Their ultimate vote will be a choice between the policies of energy abundance and affordability vs. the policies of energy deprivation and instability. Given the current situation on the European continent, it would seem a fairly easy choice to make.
