TEXAS, USA — State lawmakers spent hours last week questioning the CEO of ERCOT, the chairwoman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas and power company leaders after extreme weather conditions led to power outages across Texas. Monday, 6 News spoke with Texas Representative Drew Darby, who sits on the Energy Resources committee, about what the legislature needed to do next.
"Certainly communication was one of the great failings of this incident," Darby said. "Communication and lack of regulatory oversight in spite of legislative direction."
It has become clear over the last few weeks that freezing weather had caused many outages at power plants across Texas. Neither ERCOT nor the PUC had power to enforce any such winterization regulations, but it was the lack of solutions and clear answers from agency leaders that had Darby and other lawmakers concerned.
"I sensed a total, especially with the PUC, a detachment if you will," Darby said. "From the questions we were asking to the responses we were given, the vagueness and elusiveness of some of the responses, the lack of information and clear direction the agency had, was very troublesome."
Darby did not yet call for immediate resignations, though Lt. Gov. Patrick had already called for ERCOT CEO and PUC Chairwoman DeAnn Walker to resign. Walker did resign shortly afterward.
Darby said frozen infrastructure in the natural gas pumps, pipelines and plants was clearly an issue that needed to be addressed. Magness would not give personal recommendations on how such preparations could be regulated Thursday.
Darby told 6 News the PUC would need to be given authority to enforce such measures, though he didn't know what the complete solution should look like.
"I think clearly we've got to establish what those weatherization or winterization standards are and then we need to have the PUC implement those standards and make sure that generators follow those standards," Darby said. "Follow up with enforcement. Follow up with verification."
Another issue was the lack of reserve power available in Texas for when the grid is in danger of falling short. Darby said Texas has a reserve margin of only 13 percent. He did not know if that was actually required by the state or if it was another voluntary "best practice" that may or may not be followed by ERCOT.
6 News also spoke to Texas representative Hugh Shine about the hearing Monday. While Shine said he did not want to point any fingers at this time, he did have concerns about ERCOT and the PUC as well.
"We need to look at the entire structure we have with ERCOT in this system, to determine what actually needs to be done," Shine said. "There is winterization that needs to be considered. There needs to be a change in the leadership between the PUC and ERCOT and the legislature. There needs to be better communications among the electrical providers."
Shine was not ready to say whether there should be mandated winterization regulations for power producers or not at this point. He said there is still a lot of investigation left to do.
"That will be on the table. That will be part of the discussion. You've got to keep in mind this is probably the first time we've had a storm like this in Texas in over 100 years," Shine said. "I'm not trying to defend any entity, what I'm trying to point out is, there are so many entities involved in what happened that we need to investigate that and uncover all of those problems and issues. It's only been a week since the storm passed through."
6 News also reached out to Senator Brian Birdwell Monday, though he was unable to comment at that time.
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