(Texas Scorecard) – Miriah Sachs and her family of four endured five freezing, powerless days during the February 2021 blackouts.
Those five days resulted in nine days without water. When the water came back on, it busted their pipes. That gave them nine weeks without a kitchen ceiling.
To keep warm, her family huddled together in their master bedroom. Ben Sachs, Miriah’s husband, tried chopping wood to make a fire. It wouldn’t burn. It was too wet from the snow. The family did not have food reserves. They bought what was available at the store. Freezing temperatures with no heat triggered Miriah Sachs’ Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. She was wrought with pain and found it difficult to move.
She shared all this and more in part one of this investigative series. She and her family were among millions who went without power across the state for days. Subject matter specialists like Jason Isaac of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Bill Peacock of the Energy Alliance said Texas’ energy portfolio is too reliant on unreliable energy sources, namely wind and solar.
If Texas had more reliable energy sources—like clean-burning coal, natural gas, and nuclear power—in its portfolio, then the Sachs family would have at most gone hours without power, not five days. They wouldn’t have been without water for nine days, and Miriah Sachs’ Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome wouldn’t have been so strongly triggered over time.
Miriah Sachs doesn’t want her family to go through this again. “I don’t have any naive expectations that it would be fixed overnight or even quickly. But zero action would be absolutely unacceptable,” she said.
Sachs also finds California-style rolling blackouts unacceptable. Just the thought terrifies her. Images of people being forced outside their homes and chaos flash through her mind. “Not having water and electricity is really detrimental to people,” she said.
Yet Texas’ energy portfolio is stuffed with even more unreliable energy, while not enough reliable energy is being built. On June 10, 2024, ERCOT warned that the state could face rolling blackouts this summer. Then, there’s the probability of another winter blackout not being zero.
Suggestions abound about how to prevent this in the future. Not all of them are good.
National Grid
Currently, the vast majority of Texas’ power grid is not connected to the national grid. Jason Isaac of TPPF said the state has only a few small voltage interchanges with Oklahoma and Mexico. Aside from that, most of our state’s grid produces its own electricity independent of the rest of the nation. This independence keeps Texas outside the purview of the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee. Our state’s energy is thus largely self-governing and self-reliant.
Some hard-left Democrats want to change that. This year, U.S. Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) has amplified calls to connect Texas’ electrical grid to the national one. He appeared on WFAA June 23, 2024, to push the idea. That was thirteen days after ERCOT’s rolling blackout warning.
“Connecting our infrastructure to the rest of the country’s infrastructure would solve [an] enormous part of the problem,” he claimed. He’s proposed a measure in Congress to that effect.
Other prominent Democrats have pushed this as well. This includes perennial failed candidate Robert “Beto” O’Rourke. Recently, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology joined in. They published a study that supported this Democrat-led charge.
Would Casar’s plan ensure Sachs and her family avoid a California nightmare? Isaac said no. “The last thing we want to do is connect to the other grids because that’s going to bring us immediately into regulation under FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee.” Why would that threaten the Sachs and millions of other Texans? Because it would make the state’s power grid more unstable. “The first thing [FERC] would do is to start shutting down coal and natural gas-generated electricity,” Isaac said. “They’re trying to do that around the country.”
So coal and natural gas would get shut down. Still, doesn’t the national grid have enough to keep the Sachs’ lights on and AC running? That’s also a laugh. “There are reliability issues all around the United States,” Isaac explained. If anything, fully jacking into the national grid would expose the Sachs’ lives and livelihoods to the California power vampire. Isaac explained that the gold rush state had commitments to buy electricity from the surrounding states. That was before they started passing policies that punished reliable electricity generation. Isaac said these policies aren’t only punishing Californians, but the wallets of citizens in the surrounding states are getting whacked with ever-rising power bills.
The madness isn’t stopping. “Now California is canceling contracts with some coal-fired generation. These plants don’t have the revenue that they once had, and some of them are shuttering,” Isaac said. “That’s going to result in higher costs not only for people in California but the surrounding states that are in that grid.”
It doesn’t sound like a fully powered solution. Maybe there would be little to worry about if only it were a handful of Democrats trying to plug the Texas grid into the national one. But there’s a bigger picture. For some time, the federal government has been an active agent, determined to acquire and command all energy generation in the nation. That’s what public policy specialist Bill Peacock said in an interview. “The Obama administration started the federal government pushing for basically nationalizing the U.S. electric grid. They did this for two reasons,” he explained. “One is just an expansion of federal government power. But they wanted to expand federal government power in order to push renewable energy across the grid so that you could build windmills in the Texas Panhandle in Oklahoma and Kansas and transmit the electricity from there.”
Washington, D.C. funded the current power grab through a previous measure advertised as being for infrastructure. The Biden administration and congressional Democrats later used concerns about inflation to push through more efforts to control electricity. They did this through the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been criticized as inappropriately named. Multiple specialists have warned this measure doesn’t solve inflation. It’s just a goodie bag to fund the desires of Democrats and their partners.
Peacock said both measures combined had assigned roughly $4-$5 billion of federal taxpayer monies to expand the federal grid for “transmission congested areas.” What’s the real purpose of this? “What they’re doing is so they can justify building wind turbines and solar panels in areas where you don’t need electricity,” Peacock said. He gave two reasons why this is a bad idea. “The first, obviously, is [that] it supercharges the federal government with more power to build unreliable energy generators.”
An April 22, 2024 newsletter revealed another way the IRA was programmed to grow unreliable energy generation. Within it is a $7 billion project to win support for D.C.’s energy conquest: the “Solar for All” program. Its advertised purpose is to develop residential solar energy programs for “low-income and disadvantaged communities.” Two groups in Texas vied for this money. One was the Texas Solar for All Coalition which includes local governments in the state. In an April 22, 2024 newsletter, Tarrant County Commissioner Elisa Simmons (D) crowed about how the Biden administration awarded this coalition $250 million federal taxpayer monies. It turned out that Tarrant County is a part of the Texas Solar for All Coalition. How is that possible since the county has enjoyed a Republican majority for decades? Republican Commissioner Gary Fickes crossed over and voted with the two Democrats—Simmons and Commissioner Roy Brooks—to have Tarrant join the coalition.
The other group the Biden administration’s project sent money to was the Clean Energy Fund of Texas. They were given $156 million. Texas’ first “green bank” is partnered with Texas Southern University, but its work won’t be limited to Texas. The EPA announcement stated it will work in 19 states, across the American South and Southeast.
Subsidies are a typical way the federal government pushes unreliable energy. Peacock said state lawmakers could counter this by making unreliable energy generators who accept these subsidies pay. “If you’re taking renewable subsidies from the federal government, you have to have a surcharge on whatever price you bid, and you’re gonna have to pay X amount more … or you can’t offer [a price] below this amount,” he said. “As long as they get to keep selling at their bargain basement prices, the folks in Texas, the traditional generators in Texas, are never going to be able to catch up.”
The federal government has also sought to destabilize Texas’ grid through environmental regulations. “We couldn’t build natural gas, coal plants, because of environmental regulations,” Peacock said. “Not only couldn’t we build them, but we were forced to retire a bunch. The environmental regulations on coal plants have also had a significant impact on the increasing unreliability of the grid.”
So that’s energy destabilization, but what is the second reason the federal energy project is bad? The unbearable cost. “There’s a reason we don’t generate electricity in Kansas and ship it to Iowa,” Peacock said. “It’s because it costs billions of dollars to build those transmission lines, and it’s a lot cheaper just to build a natural gas plant near where the people live.”
It seems like a strong argument against connecting to the national grid. Higher prices. Less reliability. Not exactly a solution. Yet elsewhere, we see potentially persistent efforts by the federal government to capture more of Texas’ grid.
One possible threat is the National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor Designation Process (NIETCDP). Texas is in its sights. As a reminder, roughly 90 percent of the state’s grid is self-governing. Parts of Southeast Texas, the Panhandle, and Texarkana aren’t. Peacock reviewed the NIETCDP and couldn’t determine whether this was touching the 10 percent connected to the national grid or the 90 percent that wasn’t. If it’s the latter, it will threaten our power grid’s self-governing status.
Image by: U.S. Dept. of Energy
A clear threat is Southern Spirit, a multi-billion dollar program to connect the Dallas-Fort Worth region with Mississippi. Brent Bennett of Life: Powered covered this long-running project. The federal government gave it final approval in 2014. It’s now going through final approvals in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. It’s not expected to start until 2026.
Even if completed, denizens of DFW won’t be impressed by the help this line would provide. “At most, the line will be able to transfer about 3 GW or about 4% of peak demand in ERCOT,” Bennett wrote. He argued this project won’t help Texas. The costs will be burdensome, the federal bureaucracy will make this project crawl, and the 2021 winter storm showed the limitations of help through multi-state transmission lines. “The two markets to the east of Texas that the Southern Spirit line will run through, the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) and the Midcontinent ISO, required massive imports of power during the storm to stay afloat, and SPP still had a brief period of rolling outages,” he wrote.
The Way Forward
During the February 2021 blackouts in the Houston area, Miriah Sachs and her family lost power in the evening. “We thought, ‘They’ll probably have it fixed in the morning,’” she said. “We were not ever expecting it to be five [days].”
Yet that’s how long it took before they had power again. They couldn’t charge their smartphones, so for a time their access to the news was limited. It was a challenging time with consequences that stuck with them for nine weeks.
She doesn’t want to go through it again. Not fixing the problem for her is “unacceptable.”
As the specialists we spoke with showed, connecting Texas fully to the national grid is not a solution. The solution involves building local, reliable power generation. It also means state lawmakers fighting against the federal government’s weaponization of taxpayer monies to destabilize the state’s energy generation. “The bottom line is that this project will not meaningfully improve reliability in Texas as long as the ERCOT market remains broken,” Bennett wrote. “Texas needs to focus on fixing the market—primarily the federal subsidy-driven overbuilding of wind and solar that is causing the existing reliability deficit—and not place its hopes on its neighbors to bail it out.”
What will the Texas Legislature do? If State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) has his way, Texas will keep its energy self-governing and self-reliant. “There is no benefit to Texas being tied to the other states,” he said. “We do not want to be under federal government purview.”
Part three of this series will examine Texans’ rising electricity bills.