When Hurricane Beryl approached the Texas coast, families in the storm’s path were rightly worried about gale-force winds and flooding. Power outages are always expected in hurricane season — but nobody anticipated over a million households and businesses losing power, and nobody expected 500,000 to be left high and dry a week or more later.
The problem this time, perhaps surprisingly, isn’t with the grid. There was and remains plenty of power available. The culprit of ongoing power outages is misallocation of funds that should have been spent on critical maintenance of power lines and poles but instead was spent on virtue signaling political agendas — Environmental, Social, & Governance (ESG) and Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) programs that sound showy to activists and leftist investment firms but provide no benefits for customers, let alone do anything to advance the human condition or improve the environment.
In Texas, as a result of a poor market design, over $100 billion in private capital has been “invested” on unreliable wind and solar (not to mention billions more in subsidies funded by our tax dollars) with little to show for it. Although wind and solar make up an impressive percentage of the Texas grid’s generating capacity, its actual output is wildly erratic. On a typical summer day, when demand is likely to be high, wind can produce anywhere from single-digits to over 60% of its generating capacity, and it’s nearly impossible to predict with any certainty. If you think summer is bad for alternative energy, winter is worse and much more dangerous as we learned during Winter Storm Uri.
While investors and politicians seeking to curry favor with the green lobby have been pouring cash into unreliable renewables, that money could have been spent on much more beneficial projects, like upgrading power lines to more modern designs and investing in new technologies that allow power to be rerouted without physical crews on site, which was recommended by a City of Houston task force after Hurricane Ike.
Just imagine how much more efficient and resilient our electric utilities could be if only a fraction of that $100 billion had instead been spent on more reliable and weather-hardened utilities.
Texas should not go the way of California, where negligence of routine power line maintenance and forest management have led to disastrous wildfires. Governor Abbott was right to call for an investigation into the reason behind repeated extended power outages in Houston.
One reason is clear: the alphabet soup of ESG and DEI have taken hold of the electric utility industry. Woke investment firms and elitist activist groups have all but forced companies to publicly espouse the radical climate agenda, whether it suits their shareholders and customers or not. Few have been bold enough to resist (Tractor Supply stands alone) lest the climate cartel launch their mud-slinging protests and choke off their access to capital, loans, insurance, and more.
A free market is no longer free when the major financial players are colluding — not even behind the scenes but out in the open — to gut politically targeted businesses while forcing dollars into their own “green” investments. That’s exactly what’s happening on Wall Street.
The worst part of all this? Even the most powerful financial club could never actually succeed at eliminating fossil fuels or stopping climate change — only at driving up prices and sending production overseas. It’s a power grab with no net gain.
Most, if not all, of the utilities in Texas have bent the knee to the climate cartel by embracing ESG and opposing reliability standards for heavily subsidized alternative energy sources, namely wind and solar. This has weakened our infrastructure such that even a relatively mild storm — Beryl struck Texas at just category one — can render millions without power for days. If Texas doesn’t stand up to the radical climate agenda, the future for Texas may not be so bright, pun intended.
The Honorable Jason Isaac is the founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute and a distinguished fellow for Life:Powered at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He previously served four terms as a Texas state representative.