AUSTIN, Texas — Two years ago, hundreds of Texans died when the electric grid failed during a winter storm. To make sure this never happens again, the Texas Senate is trying to incentivize companies to build more fossil fuel power plants.

They argue that’ll make the grid more reliable during future extreme weather events. Although a bill passed during the last legislative session to help weatherize the grid, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says there’s still more to be done.

“We’re going to have dispatchable [generation] that guarantees in the worst weather conditions that when you hit that light switch, the lights come on,” Patrick said during a press conference last week.

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said it’s long overdue for Texas to invest in the grid. He said this effort by the Senate is a step in the right direction. 

“What we’re witnessing now is that the leadership realizes they have a real problem,” Hirs said. “There’s been underinvestment in the Texas grid for more than 20 years. And they need to find a way to encourage new participants to join the grid [and] new transmission lines to be built.” 

The Senate is finding ways to compensate power plant owners so they can build new facilities and have a guaranteed rate of return.

As Texas grows, Hirs said more generation is needed to keep up with demand. But the legislation filed by these senators would reduce support for renewable energy, such as solar and wind.

“We have invested heavily in renewables, but now it’s time to focus on dispatchable,” Lt. Gov. Patrick said. 

Hirs said business owners can still invest in solar and wind; it’s just not something Texas lawmakers are focused on right now.

“We’ve already had days on the grid, where it’s been totally powered by renewables,” Hirs said. “Those are, of course, the best days for weather in Texas. But on the worst days, we need natural gas, coal and nuclear right now. We don’t have the battery installations that are required; we don’t have the battery technology that’s required to carry us more than three or four hours at a time. That’s going to be a lot of money, too. So the Legislature is left with this problem of trying to fix an under-investment situation that has carried on for more than a decade.”

Colin Leyden, the state director for the Environmental Defense Fund, said Texas doesn’t need to incentivize more renewables to come here because people are already doing that on their own.

“Texas has an abundance of riches when it comes to renewable power,” Leyden said. “We lead the nation. We’re No. 1 in wind. But… increasing costs on renewables… is saying we’re going to retreat from that leadership position.” 

Instead of giving more money to fossil fuel power plants, Leyden said the Legislature should instead pay Texans to make their homes more energy efficient, so less power of any kind is needed.

“That means sealing around windows, spending money on insulation, upgrading HVACs, all those sorts of things,” Leyden said. “We do not invest enough in Texas in fixing those things. And that will bring demand down and can help greatly when we talk about how we can fix some of the problems with our current power grid.” 

Doug Lewin, the president of Stoic Energy, said senators are taking the wrong approach.

“The goal has to be to integrate as much renewable energy as you possibly can because that is zero fuel cost energy,” Lewin said. “And what we’re just talking about with energy bills, you have different ways you can go. You can add a lot of costs, or you can try to reduce it. I think the goal of the Legislature should be to try to reduce that cost. We know from different surveys that between 30-45% of Texas families chose between food, medicine and energy at some point during the last year. So renewables... we have a study from a UT energy researcher that shows about a billion dollars a month in savings to the market from renewables. We need to figure out how to integrate more in order to drive bills lower.”

One bill, Senate Bill 6, frames a new series of gas-fueled power plants as a backup generator for Texas.

“I think there definitely are better options,” Lewin said. “This is a very expensive option. I had tweeted the other day that it’s about $11 billion. I had a few people DM me saying you’re under-counting, because you’ve got operations and maintenance. And you’ve got fuel costs, and all these kinds of other things that are going to go into this. So call it at least $11 or $12 billion. And the objective can’t just be reliability. It can’t be reliability at any cost. It has to be reliability for a grid that people can actually afford to keep their lights and their heating and air conditioning on. And this doesn’t achieve that. The Legislature put $6 billion on the customer’s bills last time, another $10, $11, $12 billion going on this time. At a certain point, people’s ability to pay just breaks down.”

If Lewin had his way, he’d invest tax dollars into “industry distributed energy resources.”

“These are local sources of power on the roofs and in the garages in the form of batteries, in the form of energy efficiency for homes and buildings. These distributed energy resources that build resilience not only for when we don’t have enough supply to meet demand, like in February 2021, but also during things like hurricanes or ice storms like Austin experienced earlier this year. If you have those distributed resources, you have resiliency for all kinds of different outages,” Lewin said.

Even if there’s disagreement on how best to invest Texas’ money, most lawmakers agree something needs to be done now, so Texans are never left in the dark again. 

“It’s going to take two to three years. That’s why we have to start now. We can’t wait another session to do that,” Lt. Gov. Patrick said.

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