AUSTIN, Texas — With winter right around the corner, many Texans are concerned about whether the state’s energy grid is prepared to withstand another storm like February’s freeze.

What You Need To Know

  • Texans are worried the state's power grid will fail if another winter storm hits

  • Beto O'Rourke has made Texas' energy grid his top campaign priority 

  • Although Gov. Greg Abbott claims grid concerns have been addressed, many do not feel the same 

  • O'Rourke says Abbott's efforts to reform the power grid weren't enough

It’s a top issue on the campaign trail for Texas Democrats like Beto O’Rourke, who are pushing back against Gov. Greg Abbott’s claims that the grid’s problems have been addressed. 

“Everything that was flawed, has been fixed," said Abbott earlier this year. 

While the governor is reassuring Texans that they won’t experience another blackout like they did last February, O’Rourke, a Democratic candidate for governor, has a different take. 

“We are unfortunately not ready for severe weather this winter, despite the strongest warnings given to Gov/ Abbott. He has done nothing meaningful to prepare the power grid for an extreme weather event like we saw this past February," O'Rourke said in an interview with Capital Tonight. 

The conflicting messages from the governor and his most high-profile challenger come as they head into the 2022 campaign season. 

“O’Rourke’s focus on the grid is representative of a strategy that asks voters to make this election a referendum on Abbott and his leadership, and to remind them of a particularly trying time in recent memory for most voters," said Josh Blank, research director at the Texas Politics Project. 

"As governor, I'm going to make sure that the lights always stay on, the heat runs and the water flows. This is the basic level of government that any one of us should be able to expect, and we will absolutely deliver on it," said O'Rourke. 

Abbott points to legislation passed by state lawmakers this year that aimed to make the power grid more resilient to severe weather. 

“We reformed ERCOT and weatherized the power grid to ensure that the power will never go off in Texas again," said Abbott this year. 

In a statement sent to Spectrum News, an Abbott spokesperson Renae Eze wrote, “Thanks to the bipartisan reforms passed by the Legislature and signed into law by the Governor, we are already improving electric grid reliability to help ensure Texans do not face another power outage like last winter. New ERCOT board members with more accountability measures for ERCOT and the PUC have been appointed, and weatherization requirements for power generators and penalties for failure to comply have been put into place. And with increased generation capacity and new operational changes for a more proactive response, we are able to provide more supply to meet demand. We continue working with the PUC and ERCOT to protect critical power infrastructure and increase power generation to ensure the reliability of our electric grid.”​

But O’Rourke says those efforts didn’t go far enough. 

“One, we need to weatherize the gas supply. That was the major contributing factor to the power outages that we had in Texas, and so we just got to get that done," said O'Rourke. "Number two, we got to make our homes and businesses more resilient so that we can survive one of these extreme weather events and so that we're drawing down more power going forward and so that we're protecting the consumer at the end of the day. They shouldn't have to pay the bill to do the right thing here in the state of Texas. And the last thing is we should cap the price of the gas supply during an extreme weather event so that consumers aren't getting gouged."​

O'Rourke's concern about the lack of weatherization of the state's natural gas infrastructure is one that many energy experts share.

“We did lose a lot of the natural gas fleet because of not getting enough fuel. And we still don’t have near as much clarity as to how the Railroad Commission has handled that," said Joshua Rhodes of the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin. "It's still not really defined as to  how cold are we going to winterize to, and you know, when will we get there? I don't think the gas side will be ready this winter, it won't be as ready as the power plant side is anyways.”

“If there is mild weather, I think we will be fine. If we get a storm as deep as last February, I think it’s very safe to say there will be significant problems. Not enough has been done and frankly, it’s not possible in one year to have done enough. It’s going to take Texas a long time to fix these problems. I think a guarantee, honestly, is dangerous because it tells people things are fixed and I hope that people are taking preparations to keep themselves and their families and communities safe,” said Doug Lewin, an Austin-based energy consultant and president of Stoic Energy.​

Democrats say it's an issue that resonates with voters frustrated by the grid failures, as Republican leaders defend their records. 

“The Republican monopoly on state government means that for issues like the electric grid, if a problem does actually occur during the campaign season, there's really nowhere left for Abbott or other GOP officeholders to point the fingers," said Blank. “Abbott is betting that… [both] he and the Legislature did enough, or that the likelihood of another extreme weather event is low enough that he can safely make promises to voters, regardless of the effectiveness or the ineffectiveness of the measures that they passed. However, if the power goes out, the election is going to become a lot more competitive.”