AUSTIN, Texas (CBSDFW.COM) – House Speaker Dade Phelan announced the first phase of the House’s legislative reforms to protect consumers and strengthen the state’s electric grid after last week’s marathon hearings examining the collapse of its electric infrastructure. “I am proud the Texas House is leading the charge in protecting consumers, fortifying our grid, and creating clear lines of communication and authority during extreme weather events,” Phelan said in a statement. “We must take accountability, close critical gaps in our system, and prevent these breakdowns from ever happening again.” READ MORE: Pair Wanted In Fort Worth For Shooting, Killing Game Room Employee During Robbery Here are the seven bills members of the Texas House have filed and will file the following legislation: HB 10 – Reforming Energy Reliability Council of Texas Leadership (Paddie) HB 10 restructures the ERCOT board, replacing the unaffiliated members with members appointed by the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Speaker of the House. HB 10 also requires all board members to reside in the state of Texas and creates an additional ERCOT board member slot to represent consumer interests. HB 11 – Protecting Consumers and Hardening Facilities for Extreme Weather (Paddie) HB 11 requires electric transmission and generation facilities in this state to be weatherized against the spectrum of extreme weather Texas may face. Utilities will be required to reconnect service as soon as possible and prevent slower reconnections for low-income areas, rural Texas, and small communities. HB 12 – Alerting Texans During Emergencies (Raymond) HB 12 creates a statewide disaster alert system administered by Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM) to alert Texans across the state about impending disasters and extreme weather events. The alerts will also provide targeted information on extended power outages to the state’s regions most affected. This system builds off the model used ...
Idaho power outage
Deadly Winter Storms Just Latest Disaster To Befall The Needy In Texas
HOUSTON (CBSDFW.COM/AP) — The winter storms that began on Valentine’s Day in Texas, which experts say may have caused billions of dollars in damage, is just the latest disaster in recent years to disproportionately affect communities of color and poor residents in the state. Ernest and Hester Collins already faced their share of hardships before last month’s deadly winter storm plunged much of Texas into a deep freeze and knocked out power to millions of homes, including their modest rental in one of Houston’s historically Black neighborhoods, Fifth Ward. READ MORE: Pair Wanted In Fort Worth For Shooting, Killing Game Room Employee During Robbery The brother and sister were getting by on a fixed income without a car when the storm left them and many neighbors without light or heat for days. The storm caused their pipes to burst, leaving some in the nation’s fourth-largest city without running water three weeks on because many couldn’t afford repairs. Their dire circumstances left them unable to bathe and forced to use buckets as toilets. These include major floods in 2015 and 2016, devastation from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and, to a lesser degree, Tropical Storm Imelda two years later, a series of plant and refinery fires and explosions, and of course the coronavirus pandemic. Not surprisingly, many in these communities are beyond frustrated by what they feel is a lack of assistance each time a disaster strikes. “For some reason, we are not getting (help). They put us on the back burner,” Ernest Collins, 56, said. “Because we poor,” a female neighbor added. Local officials, including Mayor Sylvester Turner, say they’ve focused recent recovery efforts on helping the underserved, but their work is far from complete. Community advocates worry that residents will continue having trouble accessing help and that this will exacerbate the ills afflicting their communities, including income inequality and a lack of health care. Last month’s storm caused ...
Texas has lessons for all of us on infrastructure resilience
The snow and ice that unleashed a cascading set of power and water outages in Texas and surrounding states was a natural event. The disaster that has since unfolded is anything but natural. Horrifying reports from cities like Jackson, Miss ., whose residents are still without potable water weeks after the storm, are a direct consequence of our decades-long failure to maintain and upgrade our essential infrastructure systems. Lots of media attention over the last few weeks has focused on the Texas power grid and energy system , but these technology failures are a symptom of a larger problem: as a nation we are terrible at investing in protection and prevention. This is partly a government funding problem, but it is not only about more money or fancier technology. Our governments need to manage risk better. ADVERTISEMENT Resilience — the capacity of systems to withstand and quickly recover from predictable, if rare, shocks and stresses — is easily identified in its absence, but much more difficult to make a political case for in advance. Public budgeting and procurement processes — how we buy everything from pencils to power lines — are often driven by public and private sector leaders alike seeking the lowest up-front cost solutions. This puts long-term investments at a disadvantage, even when the benefits are clear. Without new incentives and funding sources to protect critical infrastructure and services, the default will be to prioritize short-term cost savings, efficiency and just-in-time-delivery in ways that make our nation as a whole increasingly fragile. The good news is that there are some basic steps that the federal government can take to support state and local governments and ensure that the suffering in Texas and neighboring states is not only the most recent news story of a costly and avoidable disaster. First, federal agencies need dedicated funding sources to encourage better infrastructure predevelopment . This includes all ...
‘The Right Thing To Do,’ Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick Requests ERCOT To Rectify $16 Billion Error During Storm
AUSTIN (CBSDFW.COM) – Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has called on the Texas Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to correct the emergency pricing error that continued after the power shortage ended and the major threat to the Texas grid passed during last month’s winter storm. “We are continuing to investigate the power outages of the February 15 arctic blast which plunged millions of Texans into darkness,” said Patrick in a statement, “This is the right thing to do and it is one step we can take now to begin to fix what went wrong.” READ MORE: Pair Wanted In Fort Worth For Shooting, Killing Game Room Employee During Robbery Here is the rest of his statement: “In response to grid-wide power shortages starting February 15, the PUC ordered ERCOT to institute the $9,000 per megawatt hour cost cap, which is designed to encourage increased power generation during an extreme shortage. However, according to the Independent Market Monitor (IMM), ERCOT incorrectly extended that pricing intervention after the power shortage had ended. The $9,000 price should have ended at 11:55 PM on February 17. Instead, it continued throughout the entire day of February 18 into February 19th – 32 hours total – which resulted in an additional $16 billion in charges. READ MORE: Stimulus Check Update: When Might Your $1,400 Economic Relief Payment Arrive? The IMM is Potomac Economics, an independent economics and engineering firm that has served as ERCOT’s market monitor for the past 16 years. It is their job to identify mistakes and recommend action. We have learned they contacted ERCOT on Thursday, February 18, to inform them their pricing was incorrect, but ERCOT ignored their recommendation. The IMM identified a second significant error that also must be corrected immediately. ERCOT failed to cap ancillary service prices at $9,000 which resulted in prices rising as high as $24,000 a megawatt hour at intervals during the storm. ...
