The search for a scapegoat for this week’s power outages has reached fever pitch. We would prefer that leaders focus on finding solutions rather than finding a place to drop the blame.
The first whipping boy to emerge was wind energy. Tuesday night, Gov. Greg Abbott appeared on The Sean Hannity Show where, apropos of nothing, he talked about the Green New Deal.
The truth is, wind did fail us this week. So did nuclear, coal and natural gas. Multiple sources have confirmed that wind represented a small percentage of the power lost from the storm.
In an interview with Houston’s KTRK, Abbott shifted his ire to corporations.
“The people who have fallen short with regard to the power are the private power generation companies,” Abbott said.
Another ready target has been the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, known as ERCOT. In yet another media appearance on Wednesday, Abbott said he thinks its leaders should resign.
It’s important to understand ERCOT’s role in this week’s outages. It’s a nonprofit. It doesn’t produce energy or own or operate energy assets, ERCOT vice president Chad Seely said. Think of ERCOT as a traffic cop, managing the intersection of supply and demand. As that intersection has grown troublingly cold and deserted this week, ERCOT has taken the heat.
In fact, ERCOT had to take the names of its board and officers off its website because they had received threats, a spokesperson said Wednesday.
Nine of the council’s 16 board members are elected by its 250-plus member organizations, which include electric delivery companies, retail providers, generators and more than 100 cities, of which Dallas is one. Five board members are unaffiliated, meaning they don’t represent any market segments and, in fact, are closely vetted to make sure they have no interest in any company doing business with the grid. The remaining two seats on the board go to ERCOT’s chief executive officer and the chairperson of the Public Utility Commission.
Much has been made of the fact that several current board members don’t live in Texas. Seely explained that ERCOT considers residency in its appointments but noted that residency must be balanced with other elements of a candidate’s résumé. If the nominee has run a power grid before (the current chair once led the Tennessee Valley Authority) or is an academic with extensive research in a valuable field like cybersecurity, those factors may outweigh a candidate’s address.
We agree with Abbott’s calls for an investigation which should examine private generating companies, both thermal and renewable, especially their winterizing standards. It should also review protocols at ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission. And it shouldn’t overlook legislative directives and executive leadership. We probably won’t know where all the failures came from until such an investigation is complete, so it’s not helpful to assign blame before all the facts are in.
In the midst of a crisis, what’s needed is for leaders to speak plain truths, unvarnished and clear. Getting lost in the chaos of blame is weak leadership, which is harmful to a state stuck in cascading emergencies.
