It was bound to happen as this unusually hot Texas summer wore on. As Texas grid managers at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) were forced to issue their second conservation warning in three days due to marginal available generating capacity on Wednesday, a new “I did that” meme began circulating on Twitter and other social media platforms.
President Joe Biden, of course, has been the subject of a similar meme related to high gas prices that entrepreneurs turned into stickers that have been showing up on gasoline pumps across the country since late last year. A quick search for similar stickers related to Abbot came up empty, but it seems likely that some enterprising soul will seek to make a profit from something like this should the troubles on the Texas grid continue over the next few months.
So, is it deserved? Sure, it is.
The fact is that the Texas electricity grid is fully owned in a political sense by the Republican Party of Texas. In its current baseload capacity-starved form, it is 100% a creation of Republican governors from George W. Bush to Rick Perry to Greg Abbott, their appointees to the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and to the ERCOT board of directors.
The deregulated Texas grid was created by an act of the 1999 legislature, in which the Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats the House of Representatives. That session passed Senate Bill 7, which was signed into law by Republican Governor George W. Bush in one of his last major acts before resigning to run for the presidency.
That same year, the PUCT invoked the state’s first wind energy mandate, a renewable energy credit trading program that launched a great expansion of subsidized wind power in West Texas, which has in recent years expanded into South Texas as well. In 2005, a legislature dominated by the GOP in both houses agreed to fund a massive expansion of wind-focused transmission lines designed to carry the wind-generated electricity from sparsely populated West Texas hundreds of miles to market centers in the Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston areas. The promised initial price tag of $1 billion for these lines had exploded to $7 billion by the time the project was completed in 2010.
It is entirely fair and accurate to say that the Texas Republican Party has presided over the creation of this grid every step of the way. By the time Mr. Abbott was sworn in as Governor on January 20, 2015, the critical problems impacting the stability of the Texas grid had already been readily apparent to anyone paying attention for four years. That’s because, when a major winter storm similar to 2021’s Winter Storm Uri blew across the state in February 2011, the grid suffered blackouts caused by the very same failures in the system that caused the deadly blackouts ten years later.
Gov. Abbott had been in office for six years before Uri came through, but neither he, his appointees at the PUCT and ERCOT or the Republican-dominated legislatures had chosen to take the actions they all knew were needed to correct the variety of weaknesses impacting the grid. It was always more politically expeditious to keep kicking the can down the road and hope ERCOT could continue holding things together with its figurative duct tape and bailing wire.
But all the tape and wire fell apart during Uri, right in the middle of the 2021 legislative session, and Gov. Abbott famously promised in a statewide televised speech that he would keep calling the legislature back into as many special sessions as necessary to ensure all of those weaknesses had been addressed.
Abbott didn’t follow through on that promise, and this week’s multiple conservation warnings by ERCOT highlight the one big problem area that still has yet to be addressed. That problem area is a chronic shortage of dispatchable reserve thermal capacity, which becomes crucial on days like the state has seen this week when the wind in West Texas tends to die as the temperature rises past 100 degrees. That weakness was starkly obvious on July 11, when ERCOT’s models anticipated having just 8% of wind generating capacity actually delivering power during the course of the day.
ERCOT CEO Brad Jones credited Texas power consumers for heading off a bad outcome in an interview with the Houston Chronicle, saying that many Texans heeded ERCOT’s plea to turn up thermostats during the heat of the day. That’s great, but it must be pointed out that, prior to the advent of this wind-heavy, deregulated electric grid that has been built by the Texas GOP, you would be at great pains to identify any day in any month of any year when state officials had to beg homeowners to resort to such measures to avoid blackouts.
So, yes, Greg Abbott did this. Sure, he had lots of help, but almost all of it came from his fellow Republicans, many of whom were his hand-selected appointees. With elections for statewide offices and most legislative offices coming up in November, Governor Abbott and his fellow Republicans are hoping against hope the grid that they built can hold together. Hope is not a strategy, but at this late date, it’s all they have.
[Disclosure: I am a life-long Texas Republican who has voted for Greg Abbott every time he has run for statewide office, and will likely vote for him again in November.]
