TEXAS – Did ERCOT, the Public Utility Commission and Railroad Commission ignore warnings from energy companies across the state about the severity of this winter storm? According to U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, that’s exactly what happened, and it led to the largest forced power outage in the nation’s history.

Congressman Allred’s assertion stems from a conversation with the CEO of Dallas area-based energy company Vistra who told him they sounded the alarms days before the storm. Vistra told Allred no one at ERCOT reacted with the urgency the energy company deemed necessary.

Vistra Corp. CEO Curt Morgan told Allred that ERCOT’s projections of the power supply needed were far below the demand. On February 9, the company warned ERCOT that rolling blackouts were imminent no matter what and the public needed to know.

“The analogy that the CEO use was, you know, similar to when hurricanes are coming and you let Texans know that that's coming. That’s the same kind of precautions that should’ve been taken with this winter storm. Obviously those weren't taken,” Allred said. “I think his thought process around why it didn't occur was basically wishful thinking on the part of ERCOT and state officials basically hoping that it would all work out in the end, when really there was no evidence that that was actually going to happen.”

Allred noted Texas’s infrastructure was not built for temps much lower than 10 degrees. Despite ERCOT’s lack of urgency, Allred said Vistra took “common sense steps” to winterize and salvage as much power as possible, doing things like running a hot wire along pipelines, blocking wind from critical infrastructure, and setting up space heaters.

“Not huge changes that then allowed them to mostly stay online and they increased their output for about 18% or so of the Texas state grid to 30% during the crisis because they were one of the only generators who really did not have a huge dip in output. That should have been done across the state,” Allred said. "Previously, after the 2011 incident from the federal oversight that looked at what happened, we got recommendations. But then the state then said you can choose to follow these or not, they weren't actually put in place as regulations. That can't happen again."

Allred said had Texans known how to prepare, and if the generators had winterized like Vistra, many deaths could’ve been prevented.

"There should have been much more alarms raised with the public in particular, so that folks would know what to do, but also just in terms of whether or not we should start trying to mitigate our power usage during this,” Allred said. "On Monday night while city of Dallas residents were literally freezing, we had a hockey game that was only canceled about 30 minutes ahead of time, the Dallas skyline was lit up. You have to let people know when there's something they need to be doing, maybe, to protect their neighbors like you do in any kind of a crisis. There was no communication, and that is something that, you know, whether or not they were sending some warnings to their generator partners, certainly wasn't shared with the public.”

ERCOT declined to comment on these specific allegations, but in a previous media briefing  the agency said its staff noted the storm was increasing sharply, prompting the power grid operator to send emergency notices to generators. CEO Bill Magness said “There were certainly a lot of communications from us.”

“We did all the technical notifications to the actual folks in the field doing the work, I think, several times, and with increasing urgency as we saw what was coming at us,” Magness said.

But Allred believes the public should’ve been better notified, not only by ERCOT, but by all leaders at the statewide level.

"To me, one of the largest failures in this wasn't just that we had a catastrophic failure across our grid that was predictable, that we knew was likely going to happen based on what happened 2011, but it was lack of communication,” Allred said. “There’s so much that our public leaders at the statewide level should have been doing that they weren't doing to prepare Texans for this and then afterwards to give them information about how long they were going to be in the crisis, how they can recover from it. I mean, it was really, I think it's been a total failure for communication and it's been unacceptable in my opinion.”

When asked if Texas should abandon its energy grid and join one of the neighboring interconnection grids, Allred mentioned there are a lot of benefits to having its own.

"I have here in Dallas solar power that powers our home because we have that choice. But you have to have redundancies in place, and that's what I think is another thing that I've raised and I think we have to look at is, if we were going to have rolling blackouts as Vistra was saying, no matter what we did heading into the storm, you know, then that also not acceptable that we couldn't handle the level of usage that we're going to have,” Allred said. "The whole point of having a power grid and a power system is that if the usage spikes that you can still cover it and that's possible everywhere else in the country because they can draw on outside sources because they're part of a wider network. That's not possible here for us. So we have to find some way they have redundancies. So whether that's being able to draw on the national grid or building in our own, we can't have a situation where no matter what we do right, we're not going to be able to meet the needs of Texans in a storm in which, if they lose power, they may die. That is unacceptable.”

Allred said one of the suggestions the Vistra CEO had was offering incentives for power plants that weatherize. While the recommendations for ensuring a generator is properly winterized aren’t mandatory, power plants that were able to fared better in this winter storm and remained online. ERCOT has said at the peak of the outages, 48.6% of generation had tripped offline.

“The state should consider is having a pool of funding that's available to power generators that if they see that a storm is coming in and they need to do temporary weatherizing that they can draw on that pool, and then pay back that money afterwards. Because not every company is as well capitalized as Vistra, not all of our generators have the ability to take those steps, but we want them to. So we should incentivize it and then have them pay back afterwards,” he said.

State lawmakers have filed bills that aim to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again. Representative of Texas State House District 65 Michelle Beckley revived House Bill 1986, which was first introduced in 2011 by Sylvester Turner, who is now the mayor of Houston. The bill aimed to ensure that ERCOT had adequate reserve power to prevent blackout conditions. 

"This was foreseen,” Beckley said, referencing how the 2021 winter storm mirrored the 2011 storm. “This bill was in response to that and they're going to have to study what kind of backup power they would need and then they have to provide it. So it will cost them money and that's probably why the bill didn't get anywhere.”

Beckley noted that the deadline for submitting bills is fast approaching and that it’s easier to re-file bills that died than create entirely new bills. She says she and her office staff scoured previous bills regarding energy to see which could have a chance in this 2021 legislative session.

"We can't just sit here and say everything was fine. Everything's not fine. The system completely failed at almost every level that you look at. 2011 happened. I mean, almost nothing happened, like there was almost no response for whatever reason. And bills were filed and then let die, like this one, the reserve power one,” Beckley said. “It was partisan. At the end of the day, we don't want it to be partisan. It was. And it was the GOP who killed it all. That’s the reality."