AUSTIN, Texas — Texas’ largest power generators told state legislators Thursday that it was a broad-scale failure of the state’s energy system and not one single entity that was to blame for last week’s power crisis that created one of the worst blackouts in U.S. history.

The unusually low temperatures across Texas caused widespread shortages of gas supply, which affected most power generators’ abilities to operate while freezing temperatures shut down some gas production. At the same time, as the manager of the state’s independent power grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, ordered rolling blackouts, gas pipeline compressors lacked the power to transport fuel to the power plants. 

As a result, natural gas-powered plants were forced offline, decreasing power supply at the height of demand. 

“The entire energy sector failed Texas,” said Mauricio Gutierrez, the regional president for NRG Energy Inc., to a joint hearing of the House State Affairs and Energy Resources committees.

The state came “dangerously close to losing the entire electric system on Monday morning," according to Curtis Morgan, the chief executive officer of Vistra Corp., another major power generator in Texas.

“It wasn’t a what or if, it was a when,” he said.

Heads of the power generating companies promised to deliver recommendations or what could be done to improve the state’s energy systems to the Legislature within a week, in what many Texans hope will be the start of reckoning for the pain and suffering endured by every county in the state.  

"I think market design has to be on the table. This market is going to have volatility because you — we — have set it up this way," Morgan told the House joint committee.

The winter storm that began on February 14 created a surge in demand as temperatures dropped to single digits in some places. Supply from the state’s power grid, which is managed by ERCOT, could not meet the demand, and the member-supported agency called for rolling blackouts that lasted for days across the state. 

Millions of households from Houston to Odessa lost power and heat and, later, water as the state tried to avert a total shutdown of the system. At least 40 people died as a result of the storm, with the death toll expected to rise as county medical examiners complete their assessments.

Many lawmakers grilled panels of representatives from ERCOT, electric utilities, natural gas suppliers, and transmission operators, looking for a single target of blame. 

“I want to hear who’s at fault,” Rep. Todd Hunter, a Republican representing the coastal communities of Corpus Cristi, where hurricane season has wrecked damage. “I want the public to know who screwed up.”

Gutierrez and Morgan insisted that there was no one person or entity to blame. Both executives said they were alarmed by the lack of coordinated public information or warning system in place from either ERCOT or other state entities, given that the information about the severity of the storm was there.

Vistra Corp. had “sounded the alarm,” but sensed that ERCOT wasn’t taking it seriously enough,” Morgan said. 

Morgan said Vistra Corp. began making phone calls to ERCOT and the governor’s office as early as February 10, after the power grid manager had set into motion its own process of preparations.

“It seemed the urgency wasn’t there, and it concerned us,” Morgan said.

NRG, for its part, was also alarmed at the lack of information reaching the public. The power generating company was warning its customers and had done what Gutierrez said was the best they could do in preparation, “knowing what we knew that has happened to us in the past.”

“That is the question that haunts me now: What else could I have done?” he told lawmakers. “Did we winterize enough? Yes. Did we secure the fuel supply? Yes. Did we put all human resources and staff on this as we could? Yes, we did.”

But it was not enough, Gutierrez.

“We have a system-wide problem and we need to look at it as a system-wide solution,” he said.

In the Senate, Republicans focused their criticism on renewable energy sources, particularly wind power, as unreliable and fragile as CEOs from the state power generators testified that the extreme cold had created a gas shortage, frozen coal, and fuel delays.

During his hours-long testimony in the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce hearing, ERCOT CEO Bill Magness fielded questions on his organization’s preparedness, performance, and role during last week’s record-breaking winter storm.

Repeatedly, Magness was asked to explain what authority his agency has and how he used it, revealing an organizational chart that looks like it was drawn by M.C. Escher. The embattled CEO’s response to most lines of questioning resembled some variation of “I can only manage the grid I’m given.” He emphasized that he would not have handled the situation differently in hindsight.

“It’s our job to keep the grid balanced,” he told the committee. “I think you've got to look at gas supply and availability. And there's a lot of complication there.

“I feel a great deal of responsibility and remorse about the event,” he continued. “We'll continue to investigate and be investigated, but I believe the operators on our team did everything they could have in a dramatic event.”

As several senators pointed out, Magness’ team did prevent the grid from a catastrophic failure that would have kept much of Texas in the dark for weeks. He didn’t exactly receive a hero’s welcome in the Senate.

As committee members scrambled to assign blame to the quasi-governmental agency, Republican senators — Committee Chairman Kelly Hancock in particular — grilled Magness of the viability and cost of renewable energy. The North Richland Hills Republican repeatedly asserted that green energy was getting a “free ride” because those companies that provide green energy didn’t have to pay a penalty for failing to supply their promised load, like suppliers of other sources. Magness conceded that was a market advantage for wind and solar power.

Just days before the hearing, Gov. Greg Abbott blamed frozen wind turbines for the mass outages, when a widespread failure to invest in winterizing power sources and frozen natural gas pipes played a far bigger role. 

“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said to Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis... It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”

The governor’s arguments were contradicted by his own energy department, which outlined how most of Texas’ energy losses came from failures to winterize the power-generating systems, including fossil fuel pipelines. The governor’s claim that wind power created ERCOT’s leaky boat was repeated by countless conservative lawmakers, and that line of questioning occupied much of the hearing.

Other prominent Republican senators, such as Houston’s John Whitmire, spent a good deal of their time bemoaning the loss of coal and nuclear power from the Texas grid. Magness admitted at one point that the closures of several coal-fired and nuclear plants over environmental concerns left the energy grid with less capacity than it had in 2011, the last time the state was ravaged by a winter storm. Demand, he added, is higher now.

Democratic senators focused on price gouging and whether or not ERCOT has the authority to compel energy companies to produce juice for the grid without creating the kind of high-priced energy auction we saw last week. On February 15, the Public Utilities Commission allowed ERCOT to remove the limits on the maximum amount it will pay for energy, which triggered a cascade of events that caused costs to rise to $9,000 per Kilowatt/hour. Prices normally hover around $25 per k/h.

ERCOT uses a mechanism known as Reliability Unit Commitment (RUC) to compensate companies who are asked to pump energy into the grid when they’d rather not. When 48% of ERCOT’s available energy was knocked offline last weekend, Magness initiated the RUC, which led the organization to uncap the market. The CEO defended the action by suggesting it was the only weapon at his disposal capable of dealing with the crisis.

“We're not setting policy, we're implementing the policy,” he said. “And the policy dictates the high-level of scarcity pricing that we run in the system under the conditions we saw. Now, if policy makers believe that's ineffective … we should do something different. I think that's certainly something to look at … But I think policymakers have to take that up and decide: Are there exceptions to this policy we set for certain conditions?”

Senators also lobbed various questions on the lack of weatherization of so many power plants. One expert estimated that up to 29,000 megawatts of power were stuck in frozen gas lines. (1 megawatt powers roughly 200 homes.) Magness emphasized that his organization is not a regulator. Due to COVID, most plants were inspected (or spot-checked) online, instead of in-person, which drew harsh criticism from committee members.

After the 2011 winter storm that left many Texans without power, the state legislature passed a law that required power plants to better weatherize their equipment, but the law didn’t specify which agency would enforce the stricter regulations — regulation of the oil and gas industry usually falls to the Railroad Commission, which is notoriously hands-off.

Another frequent criticism of the agency was its lack of communication prior to the storm hitting. Magness defended ERCOT’s communications, saying that the agency sent out warnings as early as a week in advance.

“I think that the communications that we were sending out that were, granted, limited to the people who run the plants and the people run the transmission lines — those expressed a sense of urgency,” he said. “And the very fact that we were sending them out expressed a sense of urgency, because we don't play around with really high level warnings. So the people who are seeing and receiving these communications should have understood, and I believe they did from what I've heard, that, that we were moving into something very serious.”