Austin News

The Texas House passed a bill earlier this week with a vote of 126-18 to spend $2 billion to weatherize power plants that failed during last February’s extreme winter storms.

HB 2000 was introduced by Rep. Dan Huberty (R-Houston) in response to the failure of power plants during extreme storms last winter that caused 4.8 million Texas residents to go without power for days in the cold and more than 100 deaths, according to Texas Tribune. Some critics blame the outages on improper winter weatherization of the electric generators, but a number of analysts say that energy policies that favor renewable generation are to blame, reported Excellent Thought.

"The first problem with HB 2000 is that weatherization should be paid for by generators, not taxpayers or consumers," Bill Peacock, policy director at the Energy Alliance, told Austin News. "Next, renewable energy played a much larger role in causing the blackouts than a lack of generation. This money won't fix the problem; it will just cost Texans more money." 

Other analysts say wind and solar power account for less than 33% of Texas' power needs.

According to Peacock, during the winter storms almost 89% of wind power's total capacity was offline and provided only 7.2% of the total load at the time when demand was highest. Solar was even more ineffective, providing zero megawatts and operating at zero percent of capacity. These deficiencies in power supply meant that it was up to nuclear, natural gas, and coal to provide 93% of available power during the winter storms until they too eventually went offline.   

"Renewable energy wasn't the only generation source that had troubles during the blackouts," Peacock told Austin News. "However, coal, natural gas and nuclear generation were more reliable than renewables and provided much more energy. And would have provided even more if over the last 20 years or so investors and generators had been investing in reliable generation from those sources instead of chasing the $21 billion worth of subsidies and benefits they received by building renewable generation in Texas."

Peacock added that he believes that if government renewable subsidies favored natural gas and coal, the outages last February could have been completely averted. 

"During the last 20 or so years, Texas has been the only market in the nation that provided reliable growth in electricity demand and thus outstanding opportunities for investors to earn a profit by building reliable natural gas and coal plants," Peacock told Austin News. "This could have kept Texans from losing power at all. At the worst, we would have experienced only limited rolling blackouts and likely would not have lost water at all. 

Peacock added that he supports bills to make renewable generators, not Texas taxpayers, pay for what he considers the harm they have caused to the Texas grid. 

SB 1278, introduced by Sen. Kelly Hancock (R-North Richland Hills), will require renewable energy generators to pay for the cost of acquiring electricity from other sources when they fail to produce electricity for the grid. 

Peacock also voiced support for SB 1255, by Sen. Brian Birdwell (R-Waco), which would eliminate the ability of local governments to offer property tax abatements to wind and solar generators.